Zara

INSEAD

Marks & Spencer and Zara: Process Competition in the Textile Apparel Industry

02/2002-4974

This case was written by Nicolas Harlé, Boston Consulting Group MBA Fellow, Michael Pich, Assistant Professor of Operations Management, and Ludo Van der Heyden, the Solvay Professor for Technological Innovation and the Wendel/CGIP Chaired Professor for the Large Family Firm, both at INSEAD. It is intended to be used as a basis for class discussion rather then to illustrate either effective or ineffevtive handling of an administartive situation. Financial support and numerous inputs from Boston Consulting Group and its associates are warmly acknowledged. The case was written largely on publicly available information. A detailed list of sources is provided in the endnotes to this case. Copyright © 2002 INSEAD, France-Singapore.

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This document is used with permission and is available to Jamie Cheng, in the course: BADM 566: Supply Chain Management - Agrawal (Fall 2009), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for personal use only from 8/15/2009 to 12/31/2009. Unauthorized use, reproduction and/or distribution are strictly prohibited.

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4974

On September 8, 2000, Marks & Spencer initiated a £20 million advertising campaign with a television commercial of a Rubenesque, size-16 woman running up a hill, tearing off her clothes and standing naked at the top of the hill screaming “I’m normal!”i Some saw this as a long-awaited recognition by the textile industry that the average British female was not well represented by the waif-like figures idolized in most advertisements. Others saw it as a desperate attempt to reclaim customers who had apparently deserted the well-established British retailer in favour of more fashionable and equally wellpriced competitors. Still others saw it as pornographic and insisted that the...