M&S Spreads the Love in the Fashion Sector

We all wear clothes and most of us love them, so it’s an enduring mystery why Fashion is such an underperforming sector when it comes to great emotional advertising. The average UK score for a Fashion ad on our Test Your Ad platform is a modest 2.5-Stars: not the kind of performance that turns any heads.

So what’s the answer? M&S and Mother London may have cracked it with their Spring ‘25 campaign, “Love That”, which spotlights a different side of dressing well and looking good. Typical fashion ads are a celebration of individual style and taste, with models flaunting the latest fashions in exotic locations: spectacular, for sure, but not especially engaging. What M&S understand is that the joy of fashion isn’t just in what you wear, but in the compliments you get for it.

So “Love That” takes us on a split-screen journey across a city as chic women in M&S clothes get out and enjoy the spring sunshine, meeting each other by chance in parks, cafes or on the street and giving a smile or nod of appreciation. The ad ends with one of these random meetings as two women literally bump into one other, but there’s no recrimination or apologies – just one woman handing back the other’s bag with an approving “Love that”.

It’s a positive, optimistic ad, full of smiles and good vibes, which already takes it in a different direction from some stony-faced fashion spots. The upbeat R&B sounds of Amerie’s “1 Thing” give it freshness and tap into a current revival of millennial pop. But what really puts this ad ahead of its competitors is the central insight.

M&S understand that fashion should make us feel good not just about ourselves but about each other. This gives it an opportunity to take advantage of one of the most powerful elements in effective advertising: what Orlando Wood calls between-ness. Between-ness is what happens when we see two characters in an ad share some kind of connection – dialogue, a look, a gesture, or in this case just a quick smile. Between-ness is so important because it creates a sense of human context which attracts the “broad beam” attention of the right-hand side of our brains, which takes notice of relationships and connections between things. In his books Lemon and Look Out, Wood shows how powerful between-ness can be as a driver of emotional response to ads. And “Love That” is full of it.

That’s a big reason why the ad performs so well in our Test Your Ad analysis, getting a 4.3-Star Rating for long-term effectiveness. “Love That” does even better on short-term Spike Rating, with an Exceptional score predicting a major impact on sales. Finally, the ad’s discreet but strong branding gives it Exceptional Brand Fluency too. And all three metrics are way ahead of the average for Fashion ads.

M&S and Mother London have built a strong creative platform with this ad, showing a way for Fashion ads to get a strong, positive response, just by reconnecting with the social element of fashion and what makes people happy about clothes in the first place.