M&S Brand Perception in 2025: What the Turnaround Tells Us

Marks and Spencer’s brand perception in 2025 tells a story that most brand strategists will find instructive, not because M&S did something revolutionary, but because they did something rare: they returned to what they were actually good at and committed to it commercially. After years of identity drift, the brand has rebuilt meaningful equity in food, clothing, and home, and the market has noticed.

But perception shifts of this kind don’t happen by accident, and they don’t happen through marketing alone. What M&S demonstrates is how brand positioning, operational delivery, and commercial discipline have to move together. One without the other produces noise, not recovery.

What Does Brand Perception Actually Mean for a Retailer Like M&S?

Brand perception is one of those phrases that gets used loosely in marketing conversations. It sounds measurable, but in practice it covers a wide range of things: how people feel about a brand, what they associate it with, whether they trust it, whether they’d recommend it, and whether they actually spend money with it. Those are related but distinct questions, and conflating them leads to poor strategic decisions.

For M&S specifically, perception is complicated by the fact that the brand means different things in different categories. The food halls carry a premium, treat-yourself positioning that has remained relatively intact through the difficult years. The clothing business, by contrast, spent a long period being perceived as reliable but dated, a destination for a specific generation without much pull on anyone younger. Home sits somewhere in between.

When I was running an agency, we worked with a number of retail clients who struggled with exactly this kind of category-level fragmentation. The instinct is always to find a single unifying brand idea and apply it everywhere. Sometimes that works. More often, it papers over the fact that the brand is performing very differently in different parts of the business, and the strategic response needs to be different too. M&S has broadly understood this distinction, which is one reason the recovery has had traction.

If you want to understand how brand perception is tracked and what the underlying metrics actually measure, the Semrush guide to measuring brand awareness is a useful reference point for the mechanics, even if it doesn’t capture the full complexity of a multi-category retailer.

How Did M&S Rebuild Perception Without a Radical Rebrand?

This is the part of the M&S story that I think gets underreported. Most brand turnaround narratives focus on the communications pivot: the new campaign, the new creative platform, the new tone of voice. M&S’s recovery has been driven by something less glamorous and more durable.

The food business became a genuine growth engine. Sparks loyalty data gave the business sharper insight into what customers were buying and when. Store investment improved the physical experience. The clothing ranges got more considered, with better fit and more relevant design without abandoning the quality positioning that M&S customers had always valued. These are operational and product decisions, not marketing decisions. The marketing followed the product improvement; it didn’t lead it.

I’ve seen the reverse dynamic play out badly. An agency I was brought in to stabilise had a major retail client who spent heavily on brand repositioning while the product range was still weak. The campaign generated awareness and even some positive sentiment, but it didn’t convert because the in-store experience didn’t match the promise. You can’t advertise your way out of a product problem. M&S, to their credit, seems to have understood this.

The clothing recovery has been particularly interesting from a brand architecture perspective. Rather than chasing a demographic that wasn’t naturally theirs, M&S focused on making their existing customers feel well-served and occasionally surprised. The Per Una brand, long a target of gentle ridicule, was quietly reworked. The Autograph range was given more consistent positioning. None of this was dramatic, but it accumulated into something that shifted perception among the people most likely to buy.

Understanding how brand equity functions at this level, and what it takes to rebuild it after erosion, is something I explore in more depth across the brand positioning and archetypes hub on The Marketing Juice.

Why Food Has Been the Strategic Anchor of the Turnaround

M&S Food deserves its own analysis because it has done something that most brand strategists would consider very difficult: it has maintained a genuine premium perception in a category where most competitors have either raced to the bottom on price or tried to imitate the premium tier without the underlying quality credentials to support it.

The “This is not just food” campaign from the early 2000s became one of the most referenced pieces of British food advertising. But what sustained the perception wasn’t the campaign. It was the product. The ready meals, the deli counters, the seasonal ranges, the party food. These consistently delivered on the premium promise, and customers who bought them formed strong associations between M&S Food and a particular kind of considered indulgence.

What food gives M&S that clothing and home cannot is frequency. A customer who buys a M&S ready meal twice a week is reinforcing their brand relationship far more often than one who buys a jumper twice a year. That frequency matters for perception maintenance. It keeps the brand present in a customer’s life in a way that occasional category purchases simply can’t replicate.

The Ocado partnership extended this advantage into e-commerce, giving M&S Food reach beyond its physical store estate. That’s strategically significant because it decoupled food growth from store footprint, which had been a constraint. It also brought in a different customer profile, one who shops online for convenience, and gave M&S a chance to demonstrate that the brand translated credibly into that context.

What the Clothing Recovery Tells Us About Brand Broadening

Broadening a brand’s appeal without alienating its core is one of the harder problems in brand strategy. It sounds straightforward when described abstractly, but in practice it requires holding two things in tension simultaneously: giving existing customers more of what they value, while creating enough novelty and relevance to attract people who previously didn’t consider you.

M&S clothing has navigated this better in recent years than it did for most of the 2010s. The mistake of that period was trying to chase younger shoppers with product and communication that felt inconsistent with the brand’s core identity. The result was a brand that felt confused rather than evolved, and the core customer noticed.

The more recent approach has been subtler. Collaborations and limited ranges have created moments of cultural relevance without requiring the whole brand to shift. The quality narrative has been amplified rather than replaced. And the communication has become more confident, less apologetic. That confidence matters. A brand that seems uncertain about what it is gives customers little reason to be certain about it either.

When I was building out a team at iProspect, one of the things I kept coming back to was the idea that internal clarity produces external clarity. If the people working on a brand don’t have a clear and consistent understanding of what it stands for, that confusion finds its way into every piece of work they produce. The same principle applies to M&S. The internal strategic clarity that seems to have emerged under the current leadership has produced communication that feels more coherent, and customers respond to coherence even when they can’t articulate why.

The BCG work on most recommended brands is worth revisiting in this context. Recommendation is a downstream output of brand clarity and product delivery. M&S’s improvement in clothing recommendation scores reflects both.

How Loyalty Has Functioned as a Perception Signal, Not Just a Retention Tool

The Sparks loyalty programme is worth examining as a brand perception instrument, not just a commercial one. Most loyalty programmes are primarily data collection mechanisms dressed up as customer benefits. Sparks has evolved into something more interesting: a way of making customers feel that M&S knows them and values their relationship.

That feeling, when it’s genuine and consistently delivered, has a compounding effect on brand perception. Customers who feel recognised by a brand are more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong, more likely to recommend it, and more likely to resist competitive switching even when a competitor offers a lower price.

The older research on how brand loyalty shifts during economic pressure is a useful reminder that loyalty is not a fixed asset. It erodes under financial stress. M&S has had to maintain its loyalty proposition through a period of significant consumer pressure, with energy costs and food inflation squeezing household budgets. The fact that the brand has held its position in the premium tier during this period is a meaningful signal of how durable the perception rebuild has been.

The personalisation that Sparks enables also allows M&S to make customers feel that the brand is relevant to them specifically, not just to some generalised version of their demographic. That specificity is increasingly important in a retail environment where generic mass communication has declining impact.

Where Brand Equity Risk Still Sits for M&S in 2025

No brand recovery is permanent, and M&S has several areas where the perception gains of the last few years could be reversed if the underlying disciplines slip.

The first is quality consistency. Premium perception in food and clothing is built on consistent delivery. A run of quality failures, whether in product or in service, erodes the premium association faster than it was built. M&S’s supply chain complexity, particularly in food, creates ongoing exposure here. One or two high-profile product issues won’t destroy the brand, but a sustained pattern would.

The second is the digital experience. M&S’s e-commerce platform has improved, but it has not consistently matched the quality of the in-store experience. For a brand that positions on quality and considered curation, a digital experience that feels clunky or generic creates a credibility gap. The risk here is that younger customers, who are more likely to form their initial brand impression through digital channels, get a weaker version of the brand than they would in a well-run store.

The third is the risk that comes with success. When a turnaround generates positive momentum, there is always pressure to accelerate growth in ways that compromise the positioning that drove the recovery. Opening too many stores in marginal locations, extending into categories where the brand has no credibility, or cutting quality to protect margin in a difficult trading period: these are the decisions that unwind brand equity quietly and then suddenly.

I’ve watched this pattern play out more than once with clients who were in recovery mode. The discipline required to sustain a turnaround is different from the discipline required to execute one. The former demands saying no to things that look like growth but are actually dilution. That’s a harder conversation to have when the business is performing well and the pressure is to keep accelerating.

The discussion of brand equity risks in changing environments from Moz is a useful frame here, even if the specific context is different. Brand equity is always more fragile than it appears when things are going well.

What Other Brands Can Take From the M&S Playbook

The M&S case is not a template that transfers directly to other brands, but there are principles embedded in it that apply broadly.

The first is that brand perception follows product and operational reality, not the other way around. You can shape how people interpret what you do, but you cannot sustainably claim a perception that your product doesn’t support. M&S rebuilt perception by rebuilding the thing that perception is based on.

The second is that clarity of positioning produces better commercial outcomes than breadth of appeal. M&S did not try to be everything to everyone. It doubled down on quality, considered value, and a specific kind of British retail identity. That clarity gave customers a reason to choose it and gave the business a framework for making product and investment decisions.

The third is that frequency of brand contact matters. Food gave M&S a weekly touchpoint that clothing and home could not provide alone. Brands that can create frequent, positive interactions with their customers compound their perception advantage faster than brands that rely on occasional high-stakes purchase moments.

The fourth is that recovery requires patience. The M&S turnaround has taken years, not quarters. The temptation in most businesses is to look for faster signals of progress, and to make decisions based on those short-term signals rather than the longer-term trajectory. The brand teams and senior leadership at M&S have, to their credit, maintained strategic consistency over a period long enough for it to produce real results.

Building that kind of strategic patience into an organisation is genuinely difficult. When I grew the iProspect office from a small team to one of the top five in the global network by revenue, the discipline that mattered most was not the short-term wins, it was the consistency of approach over time. The same clients who would have been impressed by a flashy campaign were in the end retained because the work kept delivering. Brand building works the same way.

The BCG perspective on agile marketing organisations is relevant here too. The ability to adapt tactically while maintaining strategic consistency is a capability that separates brands that sustain recovery from those that slide back.

For a broader look at how brand positioning decisions connect to long-term commercial performance, the brand strategy section of The Marketing Juice covers the frameworks and real-world applications in more depth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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