The project focused on the Marks & Spencer Clothing & Home Insight Team, which has helped improve style perception of the brand by 11 percentage points in two years through an innovative view of the company’s target customer – the ‘Modern Mainstream’ customer.

The recent success gave the team permission to go further and build a segmentation within Modern Mainstream, rooted in customer behaviour, which helps the team to track segments in real-time transactional data, Kantar market data, Mindshare media data and YouGov brand tracking data.

This development has meant the insight team have a seat at the top table and made sure that customer financial and market share targets for each segment are at the heart of M&S’s five-year plan to 2029.

For the Clothing & Home Insight Team to put customer metrics at the heart of the five-year plan, the team built the foundation of a new behavioural segmentation over six months using millions of rows of internal transactional data, which broke down customers into six groups.

M&S worked with Kantar to map this data onto market data to understand where M&S segments shopped with competitors, and then carried out research with Strat7 Jigsaw to unpack motivations and barriers to frequency.

With the segments defined, the team presented to the most senior leaders of M&S and showed how financial targets could be tied to each segment.

The work has been accepted by ExCo (the most senior executive committee of M&S), the Clothing & Home leadership team and the Business Unit Leaderships teams (for example, Womenswear). Each business unit has its own targets set for the segments to hit each year until 2029.

The Clothing & Home Insight Team also worked with Mindshare to build the segments into its media buying strategy to maximise marketing effectiveness, and now tracks the segments in its media data.

M&S is replicating the segments on YouGov’s BrandIndex panel so that the insight team can cut existing brand tracking metrics by the different segments.

The Clothing & Home Insight Team also devised a range of communication tools to embed the segments in the business, such as building a microsite on its consumer insight portal online and creating a booklet to bring the segments to life.

In June 2024, the insight team delivered an all-day insight event in front of more than 200 colleagues per session, with focus groups, live shopping missions and an insight team presentation all focused on the segments.

M&S is building on its success with the Modern Mainstream through a behavioural segmentation where real-time tracking is at its heart, and with the ability to set meaningful financial and market targets, which the company said has been game-changing in driving insight impact.

Paul Burditt, consumer insight manager at M&S, said: “We were thrilled that the Clothing & Home Insight Team won Business Impact of the Year. It was amazing to get recognised for all the brilliant work the whole insight team has done on this specific project, and it really was a demonstration of how hard we work to put the customer at the heart of everything we do at M&S in order to drive business performance and get all our M&S colleagues closer to customers.

“Not just that, but it’s a tribute too to the wonderful collaborative work we do with our superb agency partners – and we are very grateful to them.”

Ann Morgan, director at Strat7 Jigsaw, added: “It was fantastic to be part of the team that contributed to M&S’s Business Impact award.  The project they conceived was complicated, sophisticated and clever and it was a pleasure to help them to pull off the qualitative element of it.  I think we can all see how successful M&S has been recently in upping its fashion game and being a part of that success has been really interesting and fun.”

This article is based on information submitted as part of the entry process for the MRS Awards 2024.

The full list of winners can be found on the MRS website.

Some of the Research Live awards judges shared their reflections on the judging process and offer tips for those looking to enter in future. The article can be read here.