M&S’s giveaway toys have a whiff of desperation and confusion

M&S is showing the symptoms of a retailer in confusion and panic.

Last week it cut prices on a range of fresh produce to discounter-rivalling lows in a promotion backed up by a new TV ad campaign. Except the first ad didn’t really back up it up, signposting the price only fleetingly, at the end, after hammering home a message about quality. It’s as though M&S is too nervous about making value a selling point to actually go through with it.

And now, as of today, it has started giving away plastic toys with every £20 spent in M&S Food.

They’re miniaturised models of popular M&S food products, supplied by Unga, a Netherlands-based company specialising in retail loyalty campaigns. Around a quarter of the 25 “collectable” variants are made from card; the rest are plastic.

The idea is to boost basket spend and appeal to families. Spend £40 and you’ll be offered two. Or, as some will see it, spend nothing to be offered none.

The BBC’s recent War on Plastic TV series devoted significant attention to giveaway plastic toys. Presenter Anita Rani and two schoolgirl “giveaway toy campaigners” attempted to return hundreds to McDonald’s London head office. A security guard overreacted and the girls were left in tears. But it was a victory of sorts: McDonald’s and plastic toys could scarcely have looked worse.

Unga recently announced its toys could be made from sugar cane-based bioplastic, but this happened after the M&S range was already made. Instead, the retailer now finds itself giving away plastic toys right in the middle of a heated debate about plastic.

Could there possibly be, then, a worse time for M&S to do this? Come to that, could there ever be a good time for miniaturised plastic toy models of Balanced for You Scottish Salmon?

Not that the toy idea isn’t smart. Called Little Shop, it’s proved a runaway success for retailers in other countries. But the toys have tended to be miniaturised branded products, instantly recognisable to children, such as mini Nutella jars and Heinz ketchup bottles.

It’s a bit different when you’re talking M&S’s own label ‘food for tonight’ ready meal range. Could anything be less appealing for a child to play with? Perhaps a tin of tuna. Oh, wait. That’s one of M&S’s 25 too.

War on Plastic’s complaint about McDonald’s toys was that they are bin fodder. And of what could that be more true than a mini plastic model of M&S Chicken Tikka Masala, another of the 25?

M&S says it’s encouraging shoppers who don’t want them anymore to “give their collectables to family or friends”. Insert enemies, if you will.

If there are no takers, those time-rich young families can return them to an M&S Food information desk, where they will be distributed at 70 swap events at M&S Cafés. And in the unlikely event that no one turns up to those and M&S still has them at the end of the school holiday campaign, it will recycle them into “new playground equipment and friendship benches”. So it’s all fine.

They even come in paper packaging, and with a “collectors’ card” containing information for kids on “sustainability”. Perhaps it’s the card that should be handed in to the M&S information desk.

The pre-emptive measures accompanying the giveaway are an absurd irony, showing only that M&S has thought about the criticism it could attract and still decided to plough on with an idea that should have gone where most of the toys will: the bin.

When the retailer announced its full-year results in May, with the food business’s like-for-likes down 2.3%, CEO Steve Rowe said it was “deep in the first phase of our transformation programme”. It is. And there is every sign of confusion over what it is transforming into.

M&S needs to increase basket size and attract more families – but not by trying to become McDonald’s.