Will Bolland’s caution be enough for M&S?

Marc Bolland showed when he succeeded Sir Ken Morrison that he knew how to manage a legacy. And while the Dutchman was unmistakably in charge as Marks & Spencer announced its interim results this week, Sir Stuart Rose’s M&S will live on, because Bolland’s eagerly awaited vision wasn’t very radical at all.

His plan for the next three years decisively tackled some of the more eccentric moves of the previous regime, wisely ditching the Amazon web platform, cutting back the home technology offer and focusing international growth on countries where M&S can achieve critical mass through franchising rather than vainly sprinkling company-owned stores in lots of countries.

This refusal to indulge in vanity projects also manifested itself in Bolland’s reluctance to sell food online until he could see M&S would make money from it, while his plans to grow the home business in areas complementary to M&S’s core business make sense. With a web platform of its own M&S will be better able to capitalise on the real strides in multichannel it has made over the past year.

But some of the big decisions were fudged. Bolland sensibly flagged an emphasis back on to the huge intrinsic value of and trust in the M&S brand, which is what Rose and Steven Sharp so successfully did with Your M&S at the beginning of their regime. Rightly, Bolland has identified that M&S’s stores are confusing and hard to shop - astonishingly when he took 30 shoppers and gave them an hour to find five products in a store, only eight of them managed it.

Having identified the problems, to deal with them by cutting only one of the fashion sub-brands, and by keeping almost all the food brands but axing three-quarters of the SKUs feels like an unsatisfactory compromise that won’t be enough to declutter the stores. Similarly his ambitious plans to accelerate space growth would make more sense if at the same time M&S were to purge the tired small town stores that will never play a major part in the future of the business.

Maybe with his record at Morrisons we should have expected Bolland to play safe. Being the man in charge of M&S is a hugely political role, and there’s no harm in taking things gently when there’s such a volatile audience of customers, staff and shareholders to please - especially when the company is trading well. If his plan gets M&S back to £1bn profits, no one will be complaining. But Bolland has put off the big decisions about what the M&S of the future looks like for another day.