Burt (2002) - M&S

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Burt (2002) - The Failure of internationalisation in Marks and Spencer

The first formal store-brand internationalisation occurred in 1972, when M&S bought 3 Canadian clothing retailers. Even though this was expanded to 275 stores, M&S never really made it in Canada.

The brand lacked meaning there. The firm poured investment into Canada over the 1970s and 1980s, but nothing came of it.

The firm employed an organic expansion strategy in Europe, beginning with a few stores in Paris, Belgium and Ireland in 1975, spreading to Hong Kong in 1988, and the Netherlands and Germany by 1996.

Lord Rayner expanded the firm without any real strategy, seeming only to want to expand for the sake of expansion, rather than to develop the business in any direction. For example he bought Brooks Brothers in the US, but for which he paid a too high a price and the resulting costs of turning an exclusive chain into a more general one outweighed the benefits.

"The business became a collection of activities with little synergy and mix".

M&S did not really research enough into its target markets, for if it did, it would have realised that many countries, like Canada, did not "get" the UK associations of the M&S brand. In addition, the strong centralised control is a bad globalisation strategy, as it did not allow subsidiaries to make decisions to affect the local markets.