Shopping was something we did on a day out. Now people shop on the Internet or in their lunch hour. Richard Brass looks at the decline of the trusty high street store.

For most of the 20th century, eager entrepreneurs wanting to learn how to make brands work, knew exactly where to look. Even after the invention of august courses in marketing and the arrival of heavy tomes on successful branding, the best option for the aspiring marketer was to catch the train, bus, tram or hackney carriage into town and go straight through the doors of the most successful brands.

The great retail outlets that stood on the high street of every town and city in the industrial world were solid examples of branding at its best. Their stupendous success was measured by their position in the prime spots on the roads of the busiest communities. Department stores and chains became the modern equivalents of medieval cathedrals, the focal point where everybody came to worship. And while other products and retailers would come and go, the solid certainties of the high street would endure forever.

Except, it seems, they haven’t. Suddenly many of these infallible giants are ailing. Like the cathedrals they supplanted, the great retailers are having a good deal of trouble getting punters through the doors, and some of the world’s best-known legacy brands are on the slide.

In Britain, the most prominent case is Marks & Spencer. Once king of the high street, whose name meant quality and reliability, declining sales and uncertain leadership have damaged the value of the brand and made it juicy prey to an aggressive takeover assault. WH Smith, an institution whose success dates back to the 1850s when it snapped up the rights to sell newspapers in the brand-new stations of the world’s first rail network, is having tough times. Boots, which Britons would once have been excused for believing was the country’s only chemist, has serious problems. Sainsbury’s, at one time the shorthand word for supermarket, has seen better days. Dixons, the electrical retailer, is in trouble. It’s a long, sorry list, and it’s not just a British one, because the downward trend among the big old names is sweeping the main streets of North America too. Sales have been sliding at Eddie Bauer, the troubled casual clothes retailer that was started up in 1920 and the department store Sears has recently reported an 83% drop in earnings, another slide in its fourth year of declining sales.

The experts have their theories. Some say the decline is a matter of access. Out-of-town retail facilities mean you can do all your shopping by car, without having to come anywhere near busy urban streets. Internet shopping means you can satisfy many of your retail needs, without lifting your backside out of a chair.

Suddenly many of these infallible giants are ailing. Like the cathedrals they supplanted, the great retailers are having a good deal of trouble getting punters through the doors, and some of the world’s best-known legacy brands are on the slide.

Others say high-street retailers represent a set of middle-class values long since dumped in the history books. Younger, cashed-up shoppers, the ones who keep a brand alive into the future, find it hard to get excited about going all the way into town to buy clothes that even their parents wouldn’t wear.

But in some ways the legacy brands are victims of their success. Shopping used to be something people did once in a while, one activity among many, and when they did it they made a day of it. They dressed up, went into town, had a coffee, maybe lunch, maybe even watched a movie, and came home with a big pile of bags and the retail hunger satisfied for a time. It was an occasional activity. But for most people today, shopping is a permanent state. It never stops. You pick up something here, something there, something on the net, something in town. A slick and pervasive marketing culture means the drive to buy is constantly stimulated, and never satisfied. As the soaring figures for personal debt testify, we’re all shoppers now, all the time.

That’s what the experts say. But the real reason could be much more fundamental. A straw poll of British women reveals that Marks & Spencer’s knickers are not what they used to be. Against a judgment like that, even the best brand in the world is doomed.

This article first appeared in IP Review, issue 8

For more articles by Richard Brass please click here

User Comments

Post a comment