Debenhams and Topshop’s demise was written in the stars

Debenhams and Topshop are two very familiar names missing from the UK high street as stores and restaurants start welcoming back customers.

It would be easy to blame lockdown, and you can’t underestimate how dramatic it has been for stores to be mostly shut for the past year. However, My Telescope figures show that both brands were sadly doomed to fail because they had ceased to keep their core customers digitally engaged.

 Lockdown marked the end, but their demise was already written in the stars. That was the conclusion Retail Gazette formed when they looked at our Share of Search figures for the two former giants of the UK high street.

Topshop’s failure to adapt was costly 

The Share of Search warnings signs were already there four years ago for Topshop which was starting to slip badly. In fact, our figures show a huge drop off in interest in the brand during 2017 to 2018 which was not revealed to investors until 2019. It was hinted at, where you can see a red dot in early 2018 when Sir Philip Green had to deny rumours he was trying to sell the company (noted on its timeline by the first of three red circles).

The true picture only emerged a year later, in 2019, when Topshop and its owner, Arcadia, each revealed they had suffered their first annual loss in six years between September 2017 and September 2018.

As we see from the graph, though, this wasn’t the end of the company, but it was a major warning signal to engage better with customers online that was completely ignored.

Share of Search then levels out a little for Topshop until it went through two rounds of significant stores closures – our other two (colour) circles. Once the company gave up on its stores, its customers gave up on the brand, as the further downward slide in search interest reveals.

This is not just a story of search, of course, even though it can be seen in Share of Search figures. It is a tale of a business that was infamous for its refusal to embrace online marketing and retailing, in direct contrast to new brands that were launching and appealing to Gen Z through digital marketing, particularly through social media.

Topshop didn’t adapt to engage its audience. It didn’t shift strategy to sell to consumers where they had started to buy. So, Topshop’s target audience just lost interest, as we can clearly see from the Share of Search graph.

Debenhams never engaged customers online

With Debenhams, we have a similar story, although it is a little more nuanced. To be blunt, Debenhams failed to connect with its customers online. Originally, this is possibly because, unlike Topshop, its shoppers were a little older and accustomed to shopping in store.

However, the department store that you could once almost guarantee would be in most major high streets, did very little to court the interest of its shoppers online. This meant that when it first went into administration in 2019, our first orange circle on its timeline, its Share of Search dipped. To be fair, it wasn’t particularly high in the first place. 

The beginning of the end was lockdown. When stores closed at the end of March 2020 – our second orange circle on Debenhams’ timeline – the store simply couldn’t rely on customers to suddenly start searching for its clothing ranges online. It had not successfully encouraged that behaviour previously, presumably because it saw itself as a traditional bricks and mortar retailer, rather than an omnichannel department store of the future. More to the point, that is most definitely how its customers saw it.

This failure to develop a strong ecommerce brand means that when the second round of lockdown measures are announced in November (just before the country went into a full national lockdown) the game was over for Debenhams (as noted by the third circle on its timeline).

Its problems were not all online, of course. Poor sales in-store had left it appealing to landlords to a deal on rent for at least a year before lockdown occurred. It had major problems with sales and this was exacerbated by a failure to appeal to its customer base online.

When the proverbial chips were down, it could not rely on online search interest. Contrast that with JD Sports which absolutely shoots up once lockdown measures are put in place. This is almost certainly a sign of people looking for sports clothes so they could take their one hour of outdoor exercise permitted by the government. It is also a sign of casual clothes taking over from more formal office wear as Zoom calls replaced office meetings.

Both stores missed engagement warning signals

The demise of both Topshop and Debenhams was written in the stars, as our Share of Search figures show. They underline the importance for retailers to engage customers where those shoppers want to buy, rather than standing still and ignore ecommerce and mcommerce.

Share of Search is a vital tool for both brand health and sales levels which can be used to spot problems to guide companies to make better choices about how they engage with their audiences. Debenhams and Top Shop show how vital it is, now the data is available, not to ignore warning signs but use them as a signal to double down on customer focus.