Mum’s not the word when it comes to retail brands

If I had been asked to predict late last year which retailers would enjoy a relatively prosperous Christmas trading period and which were bound for a torrid time, I think that I should have been bang on the mark.

But any such prediction would have been a blindingly obvious one, like having a pre-Christmas premonition that Manchester United would have a better season than Wolves, or that Jordan would shed her clothing in tabloid newspapers.

So spotting the post-Christmas casualties would have offered little sport – bagging retail losers is rather like smashing clay pigeons the size of dinner plates over a fence post. It would have been about as much fun, in fact, as being a director of Marks & Spencer, Boots or WH Smith.

It’s not my intention to intrude on public grief by documenting the full details of the horrors of these retailers’ Christmas seasons, or indeed their problems in 2003. All of that has this week been comprehensively recorded elsewhere. I am more concerned with the broader implications of the continued collapse in consumer confidence in these erstwhile icons of the British high street.

The signs of this collapse have long been apparent – and that’s another reason why any pre-Christmas “predictions” of their plight would have been bogus. It would have been a bit like saying that we could expect Saddam Hussein to have a tough time of things in 2004.

The comings and goings among M&S’s senior executives since the abdication of Sir Rick Greenbury have notably failed to stem the flooding of the hull of this redoubtable old dreadnought. WH Smith has acknowledged that it has been a case study of how not to be a good retailer, placing the wrong products in the wrong places in its stores – its head of retail, Beverley Hodson, was subsequently acknowledged to be in the wrong job.

She is just one of the heads to have rolled. Some 1,000 employees at Boots have this week been told that they, too, are in the wrong job and will follow the 500 who were “off-hired” last year. The recent Boots story is one of ill-fated diversification – the sad failure of its beauty and healthcare treatment outlets being the most high-profile example – while others have diversified successfully into its core pharmaceutical markets.

These include opportunistic winners such as Tesco, which last week launched a &£70m price-cutting assault on Boots across health and beauty products. Just as M&S, WH Smith and Boots would have been easy losers to spot pre-Christmas, Tesco would have been just as predictable a winner. There’s nothing like a hypermarket on a roll.

The likes of Dixons and Mothercare, under the revival spearheaded by new chief executive Ben Gordon, have also had a relatively cheery Christmas season; and even HMV, which owns Waterstone’s, has shown that the markets in which WH Smith has suffered are far from a lost cause. Meanwhile, Philip Green’s Bhs continues to demonstrate that there is still a market for M&S out there, if only it could find it.

But, as I say, it would be unedifyingly smug simply to declare: “Wouldn’t you know it? The losers are the usual suspects.” The more interesting question is this: why are they the usual suspects? There seems to be a kind of recidivism, in which the cycle of decline among M&S, WH Smith and Boots – despite optimistic interludes – becomes inexorable.

It’s not as though there isn’t the talent at these retailers to turn performance around properly and consistently, rather than for the odd trading period that turns out to be a false dawn. M&S chairman Luc Vandevelde is no slouch. Perhaps he can draw some comfort from the knowledge that his private equity vehicle, Change Capital Partners, is leading the race to acquire hardware retailer Robert Dyas, which is another winner showing like-for-like growth over the Christmas trading period.

If the likes of Dyas can do it with a traditional high street offer, then why not the combined marketing brains of M&S, WHS and Boots? Part of the answer, I believe, lies in issues of branding, the changed nature of Middle England and an analogy with the world of politics.

The fact is that these retail chains are high-profile brands. They served a previous generation of Middle England. And they are having the same kind of difficulty re-engaging with a new generation as the Conservative Party.

Michael Howard’s charter for the Tories may evoke memories of fraternal Sixties combo The Bachelors (“I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows”), but resurrecting him from the Thatcher period is not unlike asking some henchman of Greenbury’s to revitalise M&S.

Middle England still wants right-of-centre policies, but there is precious little evidence that it wants them from the Conservatives. Howard’s Tories may be ahead of Labour in the polls, but so was Iain Duncan Smith last summer. It’s a false dawn, just like the various recent relaunches of M&S, Boots and WHS.

It’s the brands that are no longer desirable. Middle England still wants cheap, good- quality clothing, just as it wants low taxation and a lightweight state. It just doesn’t want them from its parents’ brands, such as M&S or the Conservative Party.

These brands don’t need relaunching. Their offers need reinventing under different brands if they are to break their recent cycles of defeat.

George Pitcher is a partner at communications management consultancy Luther Pendragon