credit the guardian
OK, it's one of the most trumpeted campaigns of the moment, winning thi year's advertising effectiveness award and helping M&S on the way to reported £1bn profit and record share price, an extraordinary turnaroun from a very recent and very public struggle. But is the current M&S advertising spearheaded by the M&S womenswear executions, actually any good? Flying i the face of plaudits and profit, I'm going to stick my neck out and say it's not
Good would be original. Six years ago (and four years before Dove), M&S tried to be original by celebrating the fuller female figure, but an image of a size 16 woman standing naked on a hilltop with the over-earnest headline "I am normal" was just too edgy and too joyless for a cuddly middle-of-the-road brand.
The advertising was widely criticised and, as a result, M&S ran from originality but it ran too fast and too far. Agency Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe Y&R's replacement "idea" was the same "idea" that fashion has used since the days of the toga - models. M&S may claim a scrap of originality in bringing back fiftysomething ex-model Twiggy to represent the older woman. But Twiggy is not any older woman, she is Twiggy, a doey-eyed, prominent-cheekboned freak of nature who will look as good at 80 as most of us look, or looked, at 30. Impossibly youthful, she joins the other four impossibly thin models in providing more impossible role models for every woman to fall short of. Nothing particularly original here.
Good would be atypical. With the very glamorous Twiggy, Erin O'Connor, Laura Bailey and Noemie Lenoir at your disposal, how could you play against type? Show models as normal people with normal family lives and issues, struggling to keep a healthy balance between home life and careers? Show models sharing tips on careers and clothes rather than bitching at and about each other? Show models speaking articulately to camera rather than mumbling monosyllabically and pouting mindlessly? But instead M&S has chosen to show its models looking thin and beautiful and gorgeous always; sometimes clothed and sometimes barely clothed, sometimes pouting at the camera and sometimes smiling, sometimes in Paris and sometimes in Rome; in an atypical way, never.
Good would be truthful. But instead of a truthful slogan such as "We sell quite nice clothes and really nice sandwiches" or "Nice to wear, easy to return" or "We're sorry we were so rubbish three years ago", we get the astonishingly glib and offensively inaccurate "Your M&S". The thing is, it's not my M&S. I am not Stuart Rose.
I don't own shares in it. I don't have a key to it. I don't design for it. I can't pick up the phone and tell them to make boxer shorts in orange gingham. The line is not only a lie, it's a perfect example of an input that should be an outtake. If you want me to feel it's "my M&S", don't tell me it is because stubborn fools like me - and there are many of us - will decide to think exactly the opposite. When I heard that M&S is actually thinking of renaming their stores "Your M&S", I nearly choked on my coronation chicken.
Good would be entertaining. But the new Christmas commercial, a big budget all-singing all-prancing-around-in-knickers blockbuster, is only entertaining if you find migraines entertaining. Why is it trying to be a low-rent James Bond spoof? Why, despite a Bassey-belted Bondesque soundtrack and villainous white *****-stroking, does M&S marketing director Steven Sharp even deny it? Why does Twiggy set off on a jet-ski and arrive on a sled? Why does Noemie Lenoir wear at least three different sets of knickers in the space of an hour? Why is Shirley Bassey butchering a song by Pink and why on earth have Twiggy and the girls travelled halfway across the globe to see her do it? And why was this - one of the most incoherent commercials I have ever seen - even written, let alone approved?
The M&S campaign is poor on psychology, low on entertainment and rich in cliche, but despite all that, seems to have worked. One possible explanation is money. M&S has spent a reported £59m on marketing this year which is an astonishing amount, almost in the Tesco league. Polish the pig hard enough and it will shine. Another explanation is that the fashion and in-store experience at M&S are actually good again - that the pig needs no polishing.
But as well as budget and product quality there is another explanation: that M&S is back where it belongs. A Britain with an out-of-favour M&S is like a body with a virus: it's an imbalance that will auto-correct. The advertising, like M&S itself, is not original or edgy, but also like M&S, is not unlikeable, of fair quality and everywhere. And with a brand inevitably working its way back to the heart of Britain, maybe that's all it needed to be.