M&S: personalisation at scale POC

Communications audit and proof of concept.

In 2022 M&S was undergoing a major business-wide digital transformation project in order to increase personalisation across its varied business units.

Leading the strategy team at ITG, I carried out a major business-wide audit of the teams and their ability to deliver personalisation at scale so we could create a unified proof of concept that showed how different approaches to personalisation would deliver different results.

This helped M&S weigh different aspects of personalisation (eg efficiency vs brand impact) in order for the business to make a set of recommendations for how to reconfigure its communications.

The objective

The M&S communications teams (food, clothing, finance, Sparks and brand-specific teams such as Jaeger) were all working independently with different objectives, audience strategies, communication frameworks, design systems and associated agencies.

While M&S had made some strides to build a core planning process to help these teams collaborate, it was struggling to understand how a truly unified personalisation strategy could work.

They asked my team to carry out a thorough audit of these teams and map their objectives, communications and capabilities and visualise how a unified journey across digital touch points might look and operate.

The solution

1. Communications audit

We delivered a thorough communications audit based on interviews with all the major business unit leads (food, clothing, Sparks, finance, brands) and channel leads (web, social, media, CRM) to map who was sending what to whom, how often, with what objectives and results and the level of personalisation being used across the business.

The helped us make some solid recommendations for how to go forward across areas such as audience and data strategy, customer journeys, levels of personalisation, new ways of working and joined up measurement and attribution.

We also delivered an operating model that showed how different teams could plan and design journeys more efficiently.

2. Proof of concept

Using our findings from the audit, we used Valentine’s Day (a major seasonal peak across all business units for M&S) to show how different approaches to integrated and personalised communications could work.

We created three different journey concepts with different levels of business unit integration and personalisation to show, for example, how automation might deliver a highly personalised experience but might lessen creative impact.

Results

Our work gave M&S a set of clear recommendations for how to go forward in developing cross-unit ways of working, integrated journeys and personalised communications.

Using our recommendations, M&S is currently creating a single customer view across business units and is adjusting its approach to seasonal planning so that it can accommodate a customer-journey-focused rather than product-focused approach to marketing.