UK and Turkey

corporate governance of wiproIn place similarities at UK and Turkey, M&S stores are of two formats for example ones dealing with foods only while the other with general merchandise with a basement dedicated to foods. The average sizes of the stores ranges from over 35,000 to 40,000 square feet and an additional remote location area of over 9290square meters. Recently, M&S has expanded its stores by some square footage; the stores were located main streets of the major cities to capture large masses of people in the towns and in metropolitan areas. (Alon 2000).



M&S has acquired market share in Turkey as one of the largest markets in Europe and has a valuable global property portfolio mainly targeting prime cities and districts globally. This has implications that M&S has progressively and successfully networked its suppliers in Turkey with it’s headquarter remaining at UK. In promotion similarity at UK and Turkey, M&S has not really advertised its products since it relied on verbal advertisements as a very powerful and cost effective tool together with a powerful brand name for marketing a product.

Even though the brand name benefited M&S initially, it later lost its value from the new and popular brands in the market. M&S only advertised for their new products, retail formats in the market that led to low brand name recognition, and this had been experienced when a new store was launched in Paris (Alon 2000). This has implications that corporate governance of wipro are failing and other competitor are gaining more advantage.

M&S spent very little in their promotion strategies with less than L5million as compared to the major competitors that spent almost L20 millions leading to reduced sales revenue (McColl-Kennedy & Kiel 2000). M&S therefore decided to invest more on sales and marketing of their products and increased their advertisement budgetary to around L20 million inviting advertisement agencies for assistance where necessary. M&S planned for a television campaign for a second time to advertise its products (Alon 1999).

The differences in marketing strategies in London and Istanbul during the crisis including closing down of stores that was done in London and in Istanbul increased number of stores were opened to gain a competitive advantage. In Istanbul, the foodstuff was doing well as compared to London where clothing was the best as favored by the climate changes during summer and this attracted so many traders to London (Alacra 2009).

In London M&S, so many people lost their jobs when most of the stores were closed down because of reduced sales leading declined profit margins as compared to Istanbul where many people found job opportunities in M&S that was one of the largest stores in the world (Davey & Potter 2009). In London the sales declination crisis was because of weaker pound value in Britain forcing M&S to start purchasing overseas leading to increased production costs as compared to Istanbul where raw materials where raw materials for production were readily available (Rowedder 2009)

Another difference is in payment options. The UK home stores can only transact with the M&S credit card holders since other cards such as American Express, Visa, MasterCard and Discover have been rejected in the M&S local markets. Customers can deposit money in their M&S credit cards to improve their purchasing power with up to 20 times for example a $100 will earn them $2000 and enhanced group pensions and life assurance contracts (Alon 1999). In Turkey all major credit cards are accepted.

In UK, even though just 3%, financial services is the fastest growing product in M&S with a profit increment of about 24% from 1998’s to L111 million and credit card holders increased in number to 5. 2 million. M&S brand name is St. Michael that targets people across all age groups and sub brands to target specific market niches leading to increased productivity. This difference in payment options has implications that M&S in UK is locking out potential customers.