By Alan wilson, Professor of Marketing at Strathclyde Business School
To some extent, the Marks and Spencer closures are not that surprising.
In terms of location, their stores tend to be on high streets or city centre streets and not to be in retail parks. And in terms of their online presence, this has been pretty low in comparison to many other stores.
The other thing is that M&S is a generalist store. So for example specialists stores such as Charles Tyrwhitt who make men's shirts can pick up custom that M&S haven't been able to hold on to. This is because, in comparison, its store environment isn't really attractive or interesting because it's such a big store.
Read more: M&S says closure of up to 100 stores is vital for chain’s future
As a traditional big department store, it has a big store size and needs a lot of staff to run it, which is expensive.
It is also inflexible in terms of how you make it attractive to people to go and shop there.
So now we're seeing questions about other big department stores and whether the large generalist shop has a future.
Often stores like M&S have been the flagship stores in areas such as Falkirk and East Kilbride in order to attract people to these locations.
So moving forward, the issue is what you do with these big store spaces, in these locations and who is going to fill these?
Other stores do not necessarily want to be located in these types of environment.
People are either buying online, or the big stores like Primark may already be in out-of-town retails sites.
So it is extremely difficult. We've already seen this with BHS stores being left empty and I think we're going to see exactly the same thing with M&S.
Read more: Marks & Spencer to report full-year results as overhaul continues
Therefore, how does a town centre build into its community other activities that drag people into the town. This is beyond the standard restaurants they've brought in, as a lot of these are now suffering as well.
The way forward for town centres is to think how they can reinvent themselves as specialist areas, with specialist types of stores, selling certain things like food or fashion, but smaller outlets, rather than the big general type store.
I don't know what Falkirk or East Kilbride can become specialist in, but that's what they need to think about to bring people in from other areas.
The issue for M&S is that by being so generalist, when people are searching online and they are looking for a particular type of clothing, they will search on that term. People will therefore find a lot in that area, rather than if they had gone wandering around M&S.
But even for M&S, there is potential to be specialist. They do that with their food stores so there's no reason they couldn't open an M&S shoes store or something similar.
Another aspect is that people who go to M&S tend to be the ageing rather than younger population. If the younger population all ordering their clothes online, if M&S is going to survive it's going to have to compete along those same lines.
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