general

Marks & Spencer

Statistics Report

BA2 Statistics

By: Aaron Thomas, Diego Devigne, Suprim Tamang

Table of Contents

Cover Page 1

Table of Contents 2

Introduction 3

Data & Analysis 4

Data & Analysis 10

Recommendations & Conclusion 11

Bibliography 12

Introduction

Marks & Spencer is a major multinational retailer with many stores located all across the globe. Marks and Spencer are commonly known for supplying ranges of branded of clothing, household/bathroom utensils, a selection of different foods and drinks, and finally a range of kitchen appliances.

The company’s mission:

· Providing new quality products in the areas of food, clothes, home, and financial services.

· Delivering high quality goods

· Offering affordable prices

· Customers value for money

Marks & Spencer also have a number of goals set for the business to accomplish, which began seven years ago. The most prevalent of these goals is to become a sustainable business, as well as conducting a large cut down on the company’s carbon footprint. Although there has been good progress shown towards the reduction of their carbon footprint in recent years, the progression in becoming a sustainable business is a very slow process.

As of the end of 2015, Marks & Spencer announced a revenue of £10.3 billion for that calendar year. This number equates to a revenue stream of £858,333,333 million each month, £198,076,923 million each week, and £28,219,178 million each day of the last calendar year. These numbers highlighting the fact that the company is a major global retailer. The company caters for a number of different consumers, as customers of Marks & Spencer can vary between the ages of 5, where there are sections for kids specific clothing, and 90, where there are sections of clothing apparel catering all ages. This does not include the fact that Marks & Spencer is used as a supermarket alternative, as the products they offer their consumers are likened to supermarket goods with better quality.

Data & Analysis

The graph above underlines some of the first pieces of data that our group gathered. For this set of data, we searched each of the three floors of the store, and discovered how many members of staff were working in which sections of the shop. This data was catalogued in order to discover whether there might be a relationship between popular/less popular sections of the store, and how many members of staff are placed there. We discovered, after surveying some of the staff members, that the sections of the store that were generally busier (Women’s clothing and food/drink/kitchen area), were much more likely to have more staff members posted in those sections.

Floor	Parking Frequency	Non-Parking Frequency	Relative Parking Frequency	Relative Non-Parking Frequency
Men’s Clothing	10	26	27.4%	27%
Women’s Clothing	7	24	25.3%	19%
Café	6	15	15.8%	16.2%
Food/Drink/Kitchen Area	14	30	31.5%	37.8%
Totals	37	95	100%	100%

The graphic above reflects the data of how many customers were users of the Marks & Spencer parking lot. The idea behind collecting this data was to better understand whether using the M&S parking lot would show a correlation with buying patterns and more popular sections of the store. The data was gathered by simply asking the customers whether they used, or even knew about the parking area at all. I had known before hand that the store had a parking area, however having gathered the data it was quite apparent that many of the customers did not know that there was one. With parking being a tiresome task in Brussels, we believed it would be it would be in Marks & Spencer’s best interest to make it more visible that there is one. This would make it easier for consumers to buy what they desire without the hassle of finding a parking place, thus increasing store revenues.

Rating Marks & Spencer

In order to understand the customer value that Marks & Spencer is trying to generate, we did a customer satisfaction survey. Our sample, which was 87, gave us a better understanding of what customers think about the shop and the brand. Based on a rating system going “from Terrible to Excellent”, we ask people about what they think of Mark N Spencer in general. Basically, how do they rate the brand. Then we did a more specific question about the shop based in Brussels. Basically, how do they rate the shop.

By doing so, we see that the correlation of the graphs gives us a good understanding of the customer value of Marks & Spencer Brussels. On the first hand, by observing the “Excellent” bars we deduct that there is an important positive customer satisfaction regarding the shop characteristics. Moreover, there is no general customer disappointment as we can see with the “good” bars and “average” bars that are stabilized. On the other hand, there is a marginal negative leverage between the consumer brand value and the consumer perception of the shop concerning the worst rating which is “Terrible”.

Purchases: Frequency and Relative Frequency distribution

As the specificity of Marks & Spencer’s shops is the offer a wide variety of products; clothes, supermarket products, kitchen items, but also service such a restaurant. We wanted to know why people go to the shop for. From an 87 people sample, we asked the customers if they were at Mark N Spencer for the supermarket, clothing, the restaurant, both or “Other” (which regroups home products, kitchen items, etc.). The results are as followed:

From this we calculated the Frequency:

And The Frequency Distributions:

Those results show two main factors: First, very few people going to Marks & Spencer for the “Home” section of the shop. Secondly, 30%, which is the higher percentage, of consumers is going to the shop in order to buy food and clothes. This occurrence confirms that the specificity of Mark N Spencer is their major strength.

The pie chart built above gives us the reflection of data about how many percentage of male and female contribute towards the food sales of Marks & Spencer. The observation is made out of 87 sample and the chart indicates 33% are male and 67% are female. The reason behind the visitor percentage of female exceeding male is because M&S is a clothing store as well and what we found out during our 3 days’ observation was that women are more fascinated in visiting M&S to buy or look for new clothes that has just arrived at the store. Furthermore, the observation also led us to find out that the shoppers would spend 15-20 minutes in the store. During these time they would get hungry and buy food from M&S. This is the result why the visitor percentage of female is more than male.

The sample size of the graph is 31. The coloured bars in the graph denote the age of the customers who visited Marks & Spencer. The observation was done on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. The result we got during the observation were that people between the ages of 20-40 visited M&S more than any other age group of people. M&S is a very expensive store and not every one visits there. People aged between 20-40 who looked classier in terms of their personal image and standard were high in numbers who visited the M&S store. These people were usually couples who came to M&S to spend time during their lunch break. Other than that, the age group of people between 10-20 and 40-65 were low.

Marks & Spencer stays open from 10 am in the morning till 7:30 pm in the evening and from Monday till Saturday. As we can see from the graph that during these opening hours, 5pm in the evening is the busiest hour. Furthermore, more people come to M&S in the weekend than on weekdays. This is because of the free time people have in weekend than in weekdays. As a result, workers are more active and performs fast service in the weekend than on week days because of the rush.

Recommendations & Conclusion

In conclusion to this report, we have analysed a range of different data collected individually and at different times of the day/week. Our combined results presented us with a variety of opinions regarding potential recommendations we developed for Marks & Spencer. The first recommendation we would advise M&S to incorporate is in regard to their parking area. Throughout our surveying process we discovered that the more frequent users of the parking structure were primarily there to use the supermarket area. We also realised that a somewhat large portion of the customers were unaware that the M&S parking existed, therefore, we would strongly recommend communicating its existence much more openly to their customers.

Another aspect of our data that we believed to be beneficial to Marks & Spencer would be the division of staff throughout the store. Considering the data, it was apparent that there are certain sections of the store that are more popular, and despite the staff we shortly interviewed/surveyed stating that they assign more employees to the more frequently busier sections, we still found areas where this could be enhanced. For example, in the supermarket area on floor -1, there are times when the floor is almost empty and times when it is packed, therefore in transitions between the store being empty and becoming busier there is almost always a shortage of staff manning the cashiers.

As the restaurant is located on the last floor of the building, we would recommend that the shop should attract consumers by exposing the restaurant to locals passing by the store. That would considerably increase their sales. The scents of their food could possibly influence consumers to buy food from their supermarket. Rather than assuming that the store primarily caters to clothes purchasers.

Bibliography

Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2016. <http://beeva.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Marks_and_Spencer.png>.

Barry, M. (2016) Plan A 2020. Available at: <http://corporate.marksandspencer.com/blog/stories/plan-a-2020> (Accessed: 11 October 2016).

Staff Data

Number of Staff Womens Clothing Mens Clothing Café Food/Drink/Kitchen Area 6.0 5.0 3.0 8.0

Floor

Number of staff

Parking Frequencies

Parking Frequency Mens Clothing Womens Clothing Café Food/Drink/Kitchen Area 10.0 7.0 6.0 14.0 Non-Parking Frequency Mens Clothing Womens Clothing Café Food/Drink/Kitchen Area 26.0 24.0 15.0 30.0

Shop Rating

Series 1 Terrible poor average good Excellent 9.0 7.0 22.0 34.0 19.0

Rating

Customer

Brand Rating

Series 1 Terrible poor average good Excellent 2.0 13.0 25.0 40.0 7.0

Rating

Customer

Frequency

Series 1 a b c d e 14.0 24.0 20.0 26.0 3.0 Column1 a b c d e Column2 a b c d e

Customer Status

Frequency

Frequency Distributions

Sales

Only Restaurant only supermarket only clothes food & clothes Other 16.1 23.0 27.6 29.9 3.4

Gender

Sales

Female Male 0.67 0.33

Age

Total number of Visitors 10 10 to 20 20 to 40 40 to 65 4.0 6.0 12.0 9.0 10 10 to 20 20 to 40 40 to 65

Popular Times

Week days 9a 12p 2,30p 5p 7p 9p 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.5 2.4 0.0 Saturday 9a 12p 2,30p 5p 7p 9p 2.4 2.7 3.4 6.0 4.0 0.0

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