Insight & strategy The M&S Anything but Ordinary advertising campaign launched in 2021 and marketing strategies, and ensures they keep the customer at the heart of their plans. Theres certainly plenty to talk about. Burditt estimates the insight team conducted or commissioned around 300,000 customer interviews, whether one-to-one, in-store, in focus groups, in-home, or in surveys, in 2021/2022. We conduct both quantitative and qualitative research all year round, using a range of different methodologies, he says. We use a range of different agencies too, so that we can get a mix of points of view, attitudes, and different ways of thinking and approaching questions and problems. One of the insight teams strategic research partners is Jigsaw, with a breadth of engagement across all subject areas, from strategic projects for international business, to issues-based research on things like sustainability, to brand work, to more tactical straightforward research projects, according to Burditt. M&S worked with Jigsaw on a pivotal piece of research that has led to a completely new approach to communicating with customers. We thought it was fundamentally important to ensure that everyone knows who the customer is Burditt explains: Instead of complicated segmentations or recourse to demographics, we wanted to create a more unified view of the customer that would help all the different teams in the business, including marketing, to really understand who their customer is, whats important to them, and what motivates them, and how that flows out in terms of what they want from clothing and home. The unreliability of age-based targeting struck him two years ago in a focus group, where women in their 60s complained that M&S clothing was for older people. That was a clear message about the extent to which we catered for their style needs. He and his team worked with Jigsaw to create a view of the customer (see case study boxout), which was used to inform the Anything but Ordinary campaign launched in autumn 2021. Burditts team continually conducts quantitative and qualitative research with customers, working with Jigsaw, Acacia Avenue and YouGov, to understand how the campaign is meeting its fundamental objective that is, to move the dial on style perceptions. The team also challenges itself to find different and better ways of ensuring the customer voice is heard at all levels, thinking about how to embed insight in the business. We thought it was fundamentally important to ensure that everyone knows who the customer is, says Burditt. They now make data accessible in a variety of ways. For example, a portal offers everyone access to the latest insight, information and research, while customer insight data dashboards feature a panoply of market and customer-related trends and data, which can be run on different time periods, interrogated, exported, and augmented by the insight team in response to ad hoc requests. In June and November 2022, they ran full-day insight fests showcase 32 Impact ISSUE 40 2022_pp30-33 I&S M&S.indd 32 13/12/2022 11:39