Beautiful floral bedding for spring: a marketing email that misfired

‘Beautiful floral bedding for spring’ is the title of an email I received a few days ago from M&S (Marks & Spencer, if you’re unfamiliar with the brand). My initial reaction was ‘Is this supposed to be for me?’: I suspect that isn’t quite what M&S were aiming for.

When I voiced my ‘whuh?’ on social media I got a reply from the M&S Twitter feed:

For a millisecond I wondered if the ‘floral bedding’ email was an elaborate phishing scam, before concluding that the M&S Twitter person might not be versed in the full detail of their newsletter campaigns.

But my reaction stayed with me. Why do M&S think I’m the sort of person who buys flowery bedding in spring? I buy new bedding when I need it, not because the daffs are coming up. As far as I know, I have never bought bedlinen, or floral anything, from M&S. The things I buy from M&S are school uniform, tights, Percy Pigs, and the occasional pair of black trousers. I never get emails about those.

This leads me to suspect that I am on some sort of ‘middle-aged women’ mailout list. Here are some subject lines from M&S emails just this month:

• Midi-length: the chicest choice for work and weekends‏ (what is midi-length?)

• Lil’ LonDunn by Jourdan Dunn is now live!‏ (Er, who? What? Should I be pleased? On further reading this is a new supermodel-designed kids’ clothing line, plastered with ‘LonDunn’ logos. I think I’ll pass)

• How to wear the straight-leg jean (I presume that you put one leg in at a time and do them up),

• Summer towels you’ll love (!!!)

Perhaps I’m overthinking this, but marketing emails urging me to refresh my towels for summer make me more likely not to shop at M&S. Now that tailored, targeted adverts flash at me on the web all the time, the M&S approach of chucking everything at me that they think someone of my age and gender might like just seems lazy. I feel that M&S doesn’t ‘get’ me, and that makes me want to find a shop that does. Or just go to a bookshop.

And no, I don’t want to find my dream denim match now. Geesh.

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The featured image is found floral by spDuchamp, and is shared under Creative Commons license 2.0. No changes were made.