How Barnes & Noble Is Winning by Rethinking the Usual Retail Conventions

The Barnes & Noble store location in Oviedo, Florida may be a bit harder to locate than others because it has a different name. As a throwback to a brand the bookseller acquired decades ago, this store location is now the one and only B. Dalton Bookseller location in the world. It's a symbol of B&N Chief Executive James Daunt's "idiosyncratic approach to mass retail."

Over the past several years, the resurgent bookseller has abandoned typical branding guidelines, killed the "racetrack checkout" used by so many retailers to force consumers to walk through a snaking path of junk designed to encourage impulse buys, and refocused their stories and entire experience on books. This relatively simplistic strategy (focus on the one product we are known for and think like an independent bookseller) has been delighting book fans and helping B&N take on "the guys in Seattle" as Daunt calls them.

The success of this strategy is quickly becoming a retail case study in how to turn around a sinking brand. An underappreciated reason for their success may also be the fact that B&N is no longer a publicly traded company and therefore is able to think beyond quarterly results. Another has been the brand's faith in the ingenuity and skills of local teams to make more decisions.

As Daunt puts it: "Booksellers are about as uncommercial a breed of people as it’s possible to come across … the irony is that the less concerned we are with the commercial, the better it works commercially."