Marks and Spencer Sparks to be ‘simplified’ as M&S market share surges

Marks and Spencer is reworking its Sparks loyalty scheme just seven months after relaunching it. The retailer plans to simplify the customer journey, make rewards more visible and more valuable, and improve personalisation, a spokesperson told Marketing Week. The admission came on the day M&S reported one of its highest first-half profits in 15 years, with market share gains in both food and clothing.

What M&S said about Sparks

Sparks was relaunched in April around personalised offers and rewards paid in pounds rather than points. M&S says more than a million extra customers have joined since then, and that both active users and the number of customers scanning each week are up. But the spokesperson was candid: “Some things are really resonating with customers and some things aren’t working as we’d hoped.” Chief executive Stuart Machin said little about the scheme to investors, and M&S has not said how its marketing budget will be split.

The fix will fall to Matt McLellan, who M&S hired from Morrisons in August to lead loyalty. In October it added Christmas offers that let members earn up to £15 in their Sparks wallet on Champagne, flowers and café spending, as Retail Gazette reported.

The numbers

Adjusted profit before tax was £403.2m for the 26 weeks to 26 September, up from £184.1m a year earlier when the cyber attack hit, according to M&S’s interim results. Food sales rose 13.9% and fashion, home and beauty sales rose 17.5%, though clothing sales and profit are still below where they were two years ago. Worldpanel data cited by Marketing Week named M&S the UK’s fastest-growing grocer in the 12 weeks to October, and its fashion, home and beauty market share reached 11.2%, the highest since 2013.

Machin was confident about Christmas, arguing that customers cutting back on eating out and takeaways is “good for us”. The next big change in stores is beauty, with Sephora shop-in-shops arriving from spring 2027 and rolling out to 100 stores.

Why it matters

Loyalty has become one of the main places UK retailers spend their marketing money, and Sparks has lagged behind. Tesco Clubcard and Sainsbury’s Nectar use member prices to lock shoppers in, and even brands without shops, such as Coca-Cola with The Club, are paying for customer data with rewards. M&S’s problem is not sign-ups but whether members notice and value what they get, and recent research shows younger shoppers are the quickest to walk away from a scheme that disappoints.

Saying so in public, in a half when the business is winning, is to M&S’s credit. A simpler Sparks with fewer, better rewards would suit a brand that sells on quality rather than discounts and has no need to join the supermarkets’ price war. The test is Christmas, when M&S food is at its strongest and Sparks has its best chance to prove it changes what people buy, not just what M&S knows about them.