You could feel the white heat of innovation burning furiously yesterday at the opening of Marks & Spencer’s new northern flagship. Or maybe the air conditioning wasn’t fully operational yet.
Wowed onlookers from the media stared dumbfounded at the array of giant TVs, touchscreens and winking lights designed to help shoppers pick out the perfect set of bed linen without the chore of actually having to walk through the 151,000 sq ft store.
As widely reported today, technology is at the heart of how Marc Bolland plans to get things back on track in the wake of the alarming quarterly figures M&S owned up to last time out.
Free Wi-Fi will be implemented across the whole estate by next May. And as The Grocer reported a couple of weeks ago, staffers will wield iPads so they can suavely pester shoppers with reams of information at their daintily dancing fingertips.
A rare discordant note in yesterday’s techno-utopia came when Bolland was heckled by a woman from the Manchester Evening News. She suggested that siting the new store - apparently the Plan A retailer’s greenest yet - on an out-of-town development perhaps wasn’t so green after all. For M&S chief executives used to suffering the tirades of militant blue-rinses at M&S tribal gatherings, that sort of nit-picking is water off a duck’s back.
A more pointed question was on the wisdom of spending £100m on shiny technology that may in a couple of years look as dated as much of the current estate does now. Some analysts thought not, though most seemed to like the “evolution” underway.
“We’ve been working hard over the past 18 months to deliver a more inspirational shopping environment for our customers,” Bolland beamed from inside his ‘sustainable suit’.
“We’ve developed better navigation, clearly defined our sub brands, we’ve made it easier to ‘shop the shop’, developed new Home and Beauty concepts and have a new look Food hall to better demonstrate the freshness and specialty of our food. We’ve achieved this by using new technology and a much more interactive shopping experience so that customers can ‘shop their way’.”
Whether it’s the start of a brave new world or just a flash in the pan will only become clear as the roll-out moves on.
No comments yet