Marks & Spencer targets recession-conscious shoppers
Simply M&S will include 500 food items, ranging from sausage rolls to whole chickens, and will increase to 800 lines in the autumn.
The supermarket said it had cut hundreds of prices on existing products and replaced its current Wise Buys stickers with the Simply M&S label. Wise Buys stickers were previously used to label food items on special offer.
Julian Wild, food group director at legal firm Rollits, said: “Clearly M&S needs to be offering a more complete shopping basket. They have to move away from being seen purely as a top-end retailer, to one that provides a more comprehensive opportunity to buy your whole weekly shop.
More mainstream
“They’re probably never going to be in a position to provide everything but they need to provide more and become more mainstream, which is what its competitors have done. Waitrose has done so very successfully and captured a much broader range of customers.”
John Dixon, executive director of food at M&S, said: “M&S customers come to us for great quality food they can trust – whether shopping for special occasions or for everyday eating. We will continue to focus on delivering this through innovation and newness and also offering great value.”
The launch will compete with Waitrose’s successful Essentials range, which the retailer launched in 2009. It also follows Tesco’s recent revamp of its Value range: Everyday Value and Asda’s and Sainsbury’s recent makeovers of their no frills ranges.
Bryan Roberts, a retail analyst at Kantar Worldpanel, said: “This new range will help shift the perception shoppers have that M&S is out of reach financially or is somewhere that you go infrequently for treats.”
