RULE BREAKERS. James Daunt- The man who is rebuilding Barnes and Noble.

There are rules. And then there are no rules. You can exist without breaking any rule. Or you can throw the rule book out of the window. Rules build the foundation. Rule breakers teach you how to fly. Rule breakers are people whose very nature is to rebel against conformity. They don’t think anything is written down to be there forever. There are no golden rules. The only golden rule is to break every golden rule. But to break the rules, you should know what the rules are. Rule-breakers break the rules by going beyond the known. They see things others don’t see. One of the recent examples of rule-breaking is happening at the bookseller Barnes and Noble. A company that was ailing for some time and had been given up for dead has suddenly risen up and is sprinting to a golden future. How did this happen? Why did this happen? A little history of Barnes and Noble would help here. Barnes and Noble was the behemoth among booksellers in America. They have existed for a century, selling books to everyone. They were one of the big-box sellers. Commanding nationwide allegiance from book readers. Complacent about the future, wallowing in the riches of the present. Until suddenly, one fine morning they were faced with an Amazonian problem that seemed too big to handle. This came with the advent of the internet. When a man called JeN Bezos unleashed his Amazon on the world. The Amazon deluge swept away everything in its path. Barnes and Noble was one of the first to get hit. People were buying books on the internet, instead of on the shelves. Barnes and Noble decided to tackle it head-on and added more stuff in its stores. An array of products they thought will beef up the brand. And maybe becoming more like Amazon was the solution. Nothing worked. The internet had shown what works online would work online, but not always the other way around. As Barnes and Noble began its spiralling journey downwards, the PE guys came calling. Soon it became another brand that Elliott Advisors had in their portfolio. Now it was a company managed by bean counters and not book lovers anymore. But the bean counters in this story apparently are good bean counters who thought creatively. So they went looking for rule breakers. And they didn’t have to look far. They found him within their own set-up. His name was James Daunt. Who better to take on the daunting task of reviving a bookseller ? The man whose name starts with a D was ready to take on the big daddies like amazon and survive. He was appointed as Managing Director by Elliott Advisors. They had their reasons. Daunt was the same guy who saved Waterstones, the venerable UK bookseller which was also now owned by Elliott Advisors. Daunt had an early start with books. He started Daunt Books ( imaginatively named) after resigning his job at JP Morgan in the US. This Cambridge-educated fella decided to align his career with bookselling for whatever fancy reason he might have had (Daunt Books today is still in existence and has seven bookstores in the UK ). After Elliott Advisors took over Waterstones, Mr. Daunt was brought on board to save the company. He did such a good job, that he was once again brought to save Barnes and Noble after Elliott Advisors purchased the company. The first thing James Daunt did after he took over in 2019 was to realign Barnes and Noble as a pure bookseller, which meant throwing out all other accumulated knick-knacks from their stores. Then he decided to localise each store, giving his store managers executive ability to make decisions. Which meant the General Manager of the store was made the Brand Manager. First, there were no rules the manager could not tamper with. That was the only motto that they had to follow. Barnes and Noble was back to being all about the book lover. So getting book lovers back into the stores was the strategy. There weren’t going to be any brand guideline manuals to go by. Each manager could do what he pleased with the logo and the brand. So you had Barnes and Noble sprouting all over with different logos that reflected the local culture and needs. Brand managers and design strategists everywhere were aghast. How could they do that? This was not what they knew. Brand guidelines are sacrosanct when it comes to brand design. Logos should have the same look and feel to maintain the brand’s core identity across geographies and places. You know a McDonald’s in California is the same as the one in Tokyo. Not so with Barnes and Noble said Mr. Daunt. Even the colours employed by each store were different. Local was in. So Barnes and Noble became your ‘local book store’ (far away from being the Big-box store it once was). The antithesis of what it began its life as. And soon book lovers started streaming in. And Barnes and Noble started becoming profitable once again. If you look deeply into the strategy that James Daunt employed, you will realise it came from a deep understanding of the book business. Domain expertise as some would call it, was at the centre of it all. Daunt realised that book buying is an experience that was very personal and an enriching process for the book lover. So he brought back that experience into every Barnes and Noble store. And he brought localisation to Barnes And Noble. General Managers were able to choose the books they wanted to have in their store. This way, local authors were represented. And unlike in the older Barnes and Noble where all stores stocked the same books, now each store had its own collection. James Daunt’s understanding began with the business, not the brand. So he corrected what was wrong with the business and the brand followed. Not the other way around. After all a brand is about the experience. This does not in anyway mean that the way to go is to throw the brand book out of the window. Brand books are still going to act as a guide as we build brands. But the trick is knowing when and where to use it. And when to look beyond it. To find the truths about your business. And customer behaviour.