We wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago about our Business Impact of the Year nomination as part of the team that helped the M&S Clothing & Home Insight Team improve M&S’s reputation for style and drive increased loyalty and spend. It really was a very cool programme of work, spread over three years and including input from several agencies, one of which was Jigsaw.
So it really was fabulous when we won!
The credit really should go to Paul Burditt and Tamsin Robertson from M&S Clothing & Home Insight team who conceived and drove the project through its many stages. It was probably the best example I’ve come across of a segmentation study having real commercial impact.
And this was down to three things overall:
- First, the use of the M&S Sparks card data to devise the original segmentation. As someone who works in an agency and group that counts segmentation as one of its specialisms it was really interesting to see internal, transactional data being used so effectively – and a reminder that great segmentations can be built on varying data sources…. In this case using internal data for the initial segmentation was clever and powerful – and it critically meant that the impact of subsequent ‘activation’ strategies were very easy to track, segment by segment.
- Secondly, the M&S team worked with other agencies broaden the scope of the segmentation – adding competitor stores shopped via Kantar data, working with Mindshare to build the segmentation into their media buying strategy and replicating the segments on YouGov’s BrandIndex panel so that they can see brand tracking data by segment as well.
- Lastly M&S did a huge amount of work socialising the segmentation internally – with workshops, roadshows, and ‘live’ focus groups to bring it all to life being just some examples of what they did.
Jigsaw’s contribution started back at the beginning in 2020 with helping to uncover 3 distinct style types, quantifying them, mapping them across shopping missions and the cycle of clothes buying across the year and bringing them to life so that everyone at M&S understood how these worked. Our final contribution was to recruit individual shoppers who met the detailed profile of the segments M&S’s data analytics team had identified and do a deep dive to discover who they actually are – providing the colour behind the data. We visited them in their homes, got them to open up their cupboards and show us their clothes, their favourite outfits and their most recent purchases and lastly, we went shopping with them to M&S and competitor stores so that we could understand why they shopped (or didn’t shop!) M&S and what could be done to change their attitudes and behavior – opening their minds to the ‘new’ M&S. All of this work ended up in an online magazine that went around M&S as part of the socialisation phase.
It was hugely interesting and a real privilege to be part of the team that won this prestigious award. It came late on in the award ceremony but was well worth the wait!
Please get in touch if you would like to find out more.
Ann Morgan, Dec 24
English (UK) 
English (United States)