Marks & Spencer is no marketing slouch these days. It partly pulled itself out of a decade-plus in the retail doldrums through a wholesale management overhaul and new products. But advertising has also been key. First the Twiggy-led campaign turned around women’s fashion. Now Roxy Music’s “sultan of cool” Bryan Ferry is doing the same for menswear. If I’d known at those 70s Roxy concerts that he’d be posing in shirts from the shop where Dad bought his Y-fronts, I’d have turned to The Bay City Rollers in despair. But it’s doing the trick: sales of products he promotes are up 40%.
All of which is why the timber industry has to sit up and take notice of the marketing campaign M&S has just launched for its five-year environmental programme.
As its investment shows, the company is clearly convinced that eco issues can increasingly be used to shape consumer choice. The press adverts alone must run to a six figure sum and the green programme itself, soberly entitled “Plan A, because there is no plan B”, will cost far more.
The initiative includes achieving carbon neutrality and cutting waste. Crucially for this sector, it also entails sourcing only “sustainable raw materials, from fish to forests”.
As we reported earlier, one issue for the trade is that M&S sees FSC certification as the only real proof of timber sustainability. The PEFC scheme is talking to the company, but widening its certification horizons still looks like an uphill struggle.
That aside, the challenge that the M&S plan and its associated promotion pose is that they will undoubtedly lead more consumers to expect and demand proof of timber sustainability. The anecdotal evidence is that, until now, it’s been NGOs and the government driving the certification issue, while the general public haven’t been that bothered. That’s clearly already changing and, with retailers increasingly making sustainability a central plank of their corporate image, the change is bound to accelerate.
And proving that M&S’s latest marketing is every bit as effective as the Twiggy and Ferry campaigns, the company has just come top in a Times newspaper poll as Britain’s greenest supermarket.
