Marc Bolland's Marks & Spencer revolution fails to take off

If Marks & Spencer were a football club and Marc Bolland its manager he'd almost certainly have been fired by now.

In the last four years, Bolland has delivered the retailing equivalent of mid-table mediocrity and M&S has been soundly thrashed by Next, its smaller rival.

The fans would have called for Bolland's head long ago.

But the FTSE 100 is not the Premier League. The M&S chairman is standing by his man and the company's owners (its shareholders) are more supportive than perhaps you'd guess.

Now, don't get me wrong. This morning's figures are, yet again, under-whelming. Sales of general merchandise are down for the 11th quarter in a row, although sales of clothing rose slightly.

And the fizz appears to have gone out of M&S's food sales which are basically flat, although the company makes the fair point that Easter falls later this year so a comparison with 2013 is awkward.

But the point here is not that these are a very bad set of results (demonstrably they're not) it's that, once again, they're not very good.

Marc Bolland arrived at Marks & Spencer, from Morrisons, almost four years ago to much fanfare and clutching a contract lucrative enough to make your eyes water.

He was the man with a three-year turnaround plan, the big-money signing who promised to bring back the glory days.

Well Bolland's time is up and, put bluntly, in many ways M&S still looks like a company in slow but steady decline.

He'll plead for patience and what is really interesting, and perhaps a little surprising, is that the big institutional investors I've spoken to seem satisfied to give him more time.

Some of them see signs of a strengthening pulse: M&S's clothing is getting better, so too is its website and its delivery service - remember £1 in every £5 we spend on clothes today is spent online.

Then there's the stuff that the customer doesn't see. I am well aware that the words "supply chain" and "distribution" are unlikely to set your pulse racing, but Marc Bolland has spent a lot of money ensuring that if shoppers want a particular bikini this summer then his shops are rammed full of them, and they don't run out.

Supreme optimists will tell you that not only will this investment start paying off but the amount of money M&S invests (revamping stores, updating its IT systems etc) is set to fall significantly from 2014/15 onward.

This should mean that if sales hold up (if), profits will rise and suddenly everything could start smelling like an M&S bouquet.

In summary: Marc Bolland's turnaround plan hasn't worked yet but at least it's coherent, no one seems to have a better one, and anyway its not yet obvious that it's failed either.

One major shareholder described Bolland's time at M&S so far as "solid but unspectacular". OK, you wouldn't want that carved on your gravestone, but then neither does such a comment suggest that his time as chief executive is in any danger of coming to an abrupt end.

M&S is facing considerable challenges. The Supermarkets, Primark, Amazon and ASOS all want a piece of the clothing action and there's a danger that M&S's food gets dragged into the supermarket price war.

Marc Bolland will tell you the revival is coming but there's no sign of it yet, even on the horizon. He desperately needs something to loom into view.