Mike Barry, head of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer, talks about M&S' priorities in choosing charity partners and its pitching pet hates.
Our partnerships cover three broad themes: health, environment and social/ poverty. Of the health partnerships, the key one is Breakthrough Breast Cancer, Macmillan with our coffee-shop business, prostate with our menswear business and leukaemia with our kidswear business. In the social/poverty area our key partners are Unicef, Oxfam and we have the Marks and Start programme. Environmentally we work with WWF, the Marine Conservation Society, Groundwork and the Woodland Trust.
Our partnership strategy has changed.
When I joined M&S 11 years ago we were supporting maybe thousands of different, relatively small projects. We decided about five or six years ago to focus on doing a few
things very well that have real strategic value for us and our partners.
For instance, we help Oxfam raise a significant sum of money each year. M&S had a challenge: to encourage more people to recycle more clothing, but we didn’t have a way to do it. By working with Oxfam and its 700 charity shops we found a mechanism by which customers could donate clothing and pick up a reward. If you donate to Oxfam we give you £5 off your next £35 purchase. Everybody gains, but it’s not a classical partnership. It was M&S saying ‘We’ve got a business challenge to address, Oxfam can help us get there and get significant benefit themselves’.
We’re also helping Unicef to raise money for a very innovative project in Bangladesh to tackle extreme child poverty. We need to be operating on a global scale as well. We fund it by encouraging our customers to recycle clothes hangers in our stores. That’s good from a planet perspective, it encourages customers and employees to participate and Unicef benefits.
We’ve got a more traditional approach with Breakthrough Breast Cancer. It’s been a very successful partnership, raising over £1m a year for the past five or six years. M&S is the largest lingerie retailer in the UK. Our core employee and customer is a 40-plus-year-old woman and breast cancer is the number one premature killer of that demographic. The partnership provides value for us – it shows we’re a business that cares, it provides footfall and PR – for our customers it’s very important because it raises awareness. A lot of the money is ring-fenced. We can say to our customers, your hard-earned money has gone to this cause to make this difference. That’s very important. There will always be one or two big new partnerships developed every year or couple of years, but not hundreds of relatively small ones.
A pitch has to be customer-relevant.
I want to hear charities say ‘We’re tackling an issue that’s relevant to Marks & Spencer and its customers and employees’. The second criterion is recognising how to create mutual value. This is not just about receiving a cheque. I also look for a culture of innovation in the charity and the fourth thing I look for is professionalism. These are very strategic, long-term partnerships, right at the heart of the M&S business model. There’s lots of scrutiny of their performance and I want to work with people who will deliver. They need to be able to connect with the media, deliver solutions on the ground and move swiftly. One of the defining factors of why we’re working with our partner organisations is if you go to the very top of them – their chief executive, their directors – they’re damn good leaders.
What puts us off in a pitch is too many charities still come in and say ‘You’re a food business. We’ve got food issues. Let’s work on this together’. But they could be pitching to any food retailer. I want to hear that they’ve really thought about our business.
In my charity partners I expect a dedicated partnership manager. Someone I can call at any moment in time. Six monthly and annual health checks on the partnership are necessary but less important than day-to-day contact. True partnership to produce true value has that organic
intermingling of the two organisations.