Brand Loyalty AKA Unrequited love

Big brands are experts at encouraging brand loyalty from consumers and they spend vast amounts of money to do it. But don't be fooled, because loyalty is all too often a one-way relationship, as M&S proved when it announced its final betrayal of the people of Newport.

Marks & Spencer spent £££millions on its Christmas advert. It does every Year. It's now a traditional annual battle between the major retailers to produce the biggest and glossiest adverts to warm the cockles of our collective hearts every Christmas, and the budgets are frankly obscene for something as fickle as a temporary festive peak in brand recognition.

The idea is to make us consumers love and trust the companies just a little bit more, and consequently spend more of our money with them. It's both an art and a science to build brand loyalty and the marketing departments of the major national retailers will be phenomenally well resourced, with access to all sorts of market research and expertise in advertising, PR, and social media. But don't make the mistake of thinking it's a genuine emotional activity on their part; it's the cold, hard science of 21st Century consumerism and market share, hidden behind a friendly smiling mask.

All of these brands will have well-worked-out CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) strategies covering everything from how they treat their staff, to how sustainable and energy efficient they are, how they treat suppliers, and how they interact with the communities in which they operate. But in reality, CSR will often be a 'need to do' rather than a 'want to do' for the big players. In today's business world you need to at least be SEEN to do the right thing, even if you would secretly rather expend the effort on increasing revenue and profit.

However, there ARE businesses that approach CSR more willingly and are genuinely driven by conscience and a desire to do the right thing, but do we really believe the big banks and multiple retailers are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts? After all, these are the same 'caring, sharing' companies that screw farmers on margin to such a degree that they can barely survive. But hey! Every little helps.

Newport was shocked and disappointed when M&S pulled out of Commercial Street early in 2013. It was a significant and defining moment in the downturn of the city's retail heart. It showed us just how serious things had got when the city's most reliable and loved retailer gave up the ghost. There are plenty of unconfirmed rumours about why they pulled out - from unsatisfactory maintenance by the building's landlord, to a hard commercial decision that the business was not getting the footfall to warrant hanging in there, none of which comforted.

M&S still has a presence in Newport, but it's now out in the cold, clinical environment of Spytty Retail Park. For Marks & Spencer's traditional (older) clientele, it's simply not the same. And with M&S increasingly evolving from a friendly presence on the High Street to the type of company that sells sarnies to stressed drivers in motorway service stations, perhaps we should have accepted that M&S no longer puts the same value on 'emotional old school retail' as its customers.

This week we learned the depressing news that M&S is pulling out of a 75 year long relationship with Rogerstone's Avana Bakeries, with 650 jobs now hanging in the balance. 75 years! Three quarters of a century! That arrangement began a year BEFORE Dunkirk, and a long, long time before the people making the decision were even born.

It's been pointed out that having 85% of your business with one customer is a precarious position to be in for a business like Avana Bakeries. That's true to an extent, but many thousands of businesses large and small are founded on, and thrive on, a single main contract or customer - from engineering companies that service a single airline, to sign writers who supply only the Highways Department.

In the Avana case, this isn't (wasn't) a typical business arrangement. The very length of the relationship would suggest that there would be (should be) deep rooted transparency, openness, trust and loyalty between both parties. Apparently not so. But you would certainly expect that the customer - M&S - would have the decency after such a long time to discuss the situation with its old partner the moment it started to get itchy feet or saw a need for change; to see if the relationship could be adapted or improved to suit both parties.

Marks & Spencer has issued a statement explaining its reasons for transferring the Avana business to an alternative supplier (Park Cakes).

As part of our work to further improve the quality of our food supply chain, we are consolidating some of our fresh desserts and cakes business and moving from two suppliers to one.

'Improving the quality of our supply chain'? In other words 'streamlining our supply chain'. Basically, putting all the business with a single supplier to reduce costs.

To make this depressing story even more unpalatable, the new supplier - Park Cakes - has previously been at the centre of claims of 'slave labour' practices. Since winning this contract the Bakers, Food & Allied Workers Union are claiming that Park Cakes is preparing to maximise this opportunity by introducing cheap agency labour.

So neither M&S or Park Cakes are covering themselves in glory here. Every business has a right - indeed an imperative - to make itself as efficient as possible. But like free speech, the process of making yourself more cost efficient comes with responsibility. It mustn't be cost-at-any-cost, certainly not if it means the likely loss of hundreds of jobs, the decimation of a community that has for two or three generations come to rely on you, and the replacement of proper jobs with low-pay temp work.

But perhaps I am being harsh. In fairness to Marks & Spencer, it does have extra costs it needs to consider. Those A-listers don't come cheap. If sacrificing 650 jobs in South Wales helps to pay for Helena Bonham Carter in next year's Christmas advert, who can blame them? And if this story does have the inevitable unhappy ending we are all expecting it to have, let's try and resist the temptation to put our boots through the TV when the inevitable mega-budget ad appears next December.

Brand Loyalty? You don't deserve it Marks & Spencer.