Flower Power

Edward Goodman transformed the plants and flowers department into M&S’s fastest growing category.  Can he coax the drinks department into bloom? asks Robyn Lewis

THE WORDS unique, cutting-edge and exclusive are not the usual terms that one would use to describe Marks and Spencer, the nation’s stalwart supplier of sensible cotton underwear.

Yet Edward Goodman, the new category manager for wines and drinks at the high street chain is, only five minutes into our meeting, trying to persuade me that this is exactly how his new department should be viewed.

"The problem is that we haven’t been that good in the past at getting the message across and no one really knew we sold wine, even," he tells me.  "Certainly no one is aware that every single line we have is exclusive.

We sell 350 wines and every last one of those is blended by our wine team.  We actually have two winemakers employed in the office and, for all the wines we make, they go along and select the blend.

There’s no other retailer who can do that because they stock brands, which makes some of the recommendations and awards we get very special.  You know, who would have thought that M&S would have got 18 of the top 100 wines under £10 in the Decanter magazine list? But we did, and those wines are solely available here.  Nowhere else."

Okay, I’m sold. I didn’t know any of those things and I’m in the trade.  M&S really has been terribly British about hiding its light under a bushel, but it sounds as though Goodman is about to change all that:  "I like to work in a very open-book kind of way.," he explains.

"I want people to see what we are doing and to get the word out." To this end, just months into the job, he has introduced a revamped wine range – doubled in size and much more comprehensive – started the roll-out of a new-look department and is embarking on an extensive staff training programme.

All very impressive, but Goodman, by his own admission, is no wine expert and came to the job via the plants and flowers department.  So doesn’t such an overhaul feel rather kamikaze? The drinks trade, as we like to think of it anyway, is highly specialised, requires a sensitivity for the  products and a hefty breadth of knowledge – doesn’t it?

"People may ask why am I doing the job when I’ve no drinks background. But I do have a good marketing background.  I’ve been a store manager, food technologist and I’ve worked in the States, where I picked up some really good marketing ideas.

The reason I’m in this job is because, quite simply, we weren’t selling enough wine in stores.  At the moment only one in five of our customers buys our wine, for our nearest competitor that figure is at least double."

But even with this summary of his career Goodman is still hiding his light under a bushel.  While in the plants and flowers department he managed to turn a small department into the fastest growing category in the whole store and to snag M&S the Fresh Flower Retailer of the year 2003 award.

"There’s a lot of crossover between what we managed with plants and flowers and what we want to achieve with wine and drink," he explains.  "We weren’t really famous for flowers and plants and, at the moment, we aren’t for drink.

Flowers wasn’t a destination category, neither is drink at the moment, and they are both hugely innovative categories.  Over a period of a year and a half with plants and flowers what we concentrated on was training and that’s one of the things we are doing with this department."

This new training programme, designed to create a "drinks advisor" for every store is not just a gesture at educating staff, Goodman is keen to point out.  "We’re actually taking this very seriously and investing in it properly.

There are 300 staff on the programme altogether and we meet up every eight months, so it’s an on-going process, and to prove our commitment to this we are flying the whole lot down to the Mediterranean to see a winery and bottling plant. We’ve had a lot of support with this from the suppliers.

As you can imagine they can see the potential is there for sales, even if they aren’t feeling it yet, so they are happy to help."  A good relationship with suppliers is something that is fundamental to the M&S offering of quality and value.

Its new addition to the Port line, for example, a 1985 vintage which sells for just £30, is, of course, exclusive to M&S and has won, "award after award this year", Goodman tells me. "We can get value like that because we’ve built long-term relationships with our suppliers and we build the business together."

This may be particularly pertinent to Port suppliers since (and I’ll bet you didn’t know this about good old M&S either) Marks and Spencer is the market leader by volume for Port over the Christmas period. "We have a wonderful range and a really loyal consumer base that come to us for their Port every year," Goodman declares.

"So what we are trying to do is to create a range that is good quality and good value throughout to keep our loyal core consumers returning, and to put in some new things to try and attract other consumers as well.

We are doing the same thing with our Champagne range; that’s another area that people don’t think about Marks and Spencer for, but we are absolutely huge in the UK market in terms of Champagne sales.

So we keep the old favourites and this year we’ve added a Duc Ambleny, an oak-aged vintage Champagne, at £24.99. It’s much more rounded and should appeal to people who maybe don’t really enjoy the acidity of normal Champagne.

I think the realisation has come that we have to be more consumer focused."  This new realisation has meant some careful market watching for Goodman and his team to try and spot trends that they can capitalise on.

 A result of this is the new regional beer range that has been brought in to drive more growth in a flourishing category.  Cleverly, Goodman has used his marketing skills to tie in the range with the launch of a new range of regional foods.

"There is a huge food and beer matching thing happening right now and we saw an opportunity that we were uniquely placed to capitalise on," he explains.  "We’ve put beer recommendations on the packaging itself, as we are beginning to do with wine.

Around 400 of our food lines now carry recommendations for beer or wine and even though, with 4,000 food lines, we’ve a long way to go, we are really going for it. That 400 will be literally doubled by April.

That’s an advantage for us, that we have the influence on packaging because its our own brand."  Goodman is also working on bringing spirits, wines and beers out into the store, and to drive sales through the Christmas period by packaging drinks in really innovative formats – such as flavoured-vodka tree decorations and a "Pamper yourself" kit with bath treats and wine.

"One of the problems we do face is the size of the big stores where the drinks department simply gets lost," he says.  "It’s easy to forget we even sell wine, which is why we don’t sell enough.

In a smaller store it’s more visible and, even though there is limited space because we don’t sell brands, we still offer a wide, competitive range.  You might have five £5.99 Australian Barrossa Shiraz wines in another retailer but we only need one, maybe two."

To combat the dearth of sales in those big stores, Goodman has – as mentioned earlier – embarked on an image re-vamp of the department.  With wooden flooring, wide aisles, curved shelving and posters proclaiming the newly found M&S USP – "We employ three wine experts" one boasts.

"The critisisms that came through before were that the layout was confusing, it wasn’t easy to shop and we just weren’t getting across those USPs. So, we’ve tried to create an environment conducive to browsing.

We hope it’s clear to navigate, gets some of our messages across and that it drives sales," Goodman explains.  It certainly does. I came away with some of that oak-aged Champagne, a regional cider and some mulled wine. I didn’t even think about buying any undies.