Barnes & Noble Chief Digital Officer - getting past the NOOK
- Summary:
- Barnes & Noble has had major problems with its foray into e-readers and its NOOK business. But with some rethinking of digital strategy, CDO Fred Argir sees a role for growth online.
In the first part of this special report on Barnes & Noble, CEO Ron Boire outlined his “digital blowback” belief in the firm’s physical stores and localized social media strategy roles in putting the bookseller at the heart of US communities.
But the firm still needs to compete in the digital marketplace, where it holds approximately a 9% share. The company has overhauled its website to fuel e-commerce growth and is drilling-down on mobile, but overshadowing all this is the NOOK, Barnes & Noble’s abortive attempt to take on the Amazon Kindle.
The firm’s full-year results tell their own story. Overall sales declined $133 million and the finger of blame was pointed at NOOK sales decline as one of the main reasons for this. So priority number one now is to stem the bleeding, a decision that has seen the firm exit the gaming app business, the NOOK video business; and the UK market. The video business has been transferred to CinemaNow and Disney, while the UK business was transferred to grocery chain Sainsbury’s. All of that has saved an estimated $4 million to date.
For all that, Boire still sees the NOOK business as something to be grown, not abandoned completely. He says:
We have 2 million very active customers in the NOOK business that are also Barnes & Noble customers. So to me it's like cutting off your leg to lose weight which I may have thought about at one point or another but it's probably not the most productive use.
But there does need to be a re-think about what that business is and does, he says:
It's not like we just sit here and go, ‘Well, can we keep tweaking it, tweaking this?’. We're thinking about different strategies for NOOK that could be less capital-intensive, partnership strategies, etc.
What we know today is what's reflected in the plan and we're going to keep working to improve Nook and how it's positioned within the company and the economic results of that. We don't feel like walking away from it in its current state or what we project it, as is accretive. But walking away is not in the mindset today.
The firm will be launching a new Samsung device later this year, as well as trying to get customers on legacy devices to upgrade, says Chief Digital Officer Fred Argir. But there are also new offerings to come, such as Nook Press, a self-authoring tool. Argir says:
We've re-platformed that NOOK Press ecosystem. It's the author tool kit that's been re-created and the re-architecture of the entire experience. The print-on-demand function is something that is now inclusive to the NOOK Press opportunity.
Mobile thinking
Argir’s also focused on revamping BarnesandNoble.com, which had a facelift in June last year. Since then, there have been 2,200 fixes and more work still to come:
We've unfortunately had to spend the last year reacting to the launch of a site. With that said, we've missed out on some opportunities which is what we're going to be focused on…Even on the design, the look and feel of the site, the look and feel of the site has been the same way it's been for years. With the launch of the new site, we never did anything on the front-end, so this year massive change and overhaul. I can see we'll be doing that for the next couple years as well.
But there’s more to be done in other areas, most notably mobile, which Argir pitches as “an incredible driver of the e-commerce business”. He says:
On the mobile side, we will focus on the experience of quick purchase, of store location, price comparison and mobile optimized pages for email. In our app business we'll focus on membership engagement, content delivery and in-store experience activation.
With the different sizes of mobile devices these days, it's important for us to maximize the real estate and optimize the experience per device, commerce with deep connectivity to the app ecosystem, fast purchases, store locations and account administration. On the tablet side, [it’s] critical to maximize the tablet experience - a simple path to purchase, store discovery order and account management and maximizing a deep content ecosystem. On the app side, we'll be focusing on consolidating a portfolio of applications that are in the marketplace and really focusing on the best portions of those apps for a better customer experience.
This enhanced mobile experience will also tie back into the physical store experience, he adds:
We all know people use their cellphones when they're inside the store. The idea was, how can we bring the online experience to the offline experience? So one of the things we'll be launching here for the Fall is a mobile application that will allow folks to walk in and they will be geo-located, so we'll know what store they're in. They’ll have a wish list. It will populate a store map. So it would be a store-specific digital map people will have on their phone.
If you're like me, you want to do a search and at least get me close to where the book is that I'm looking to buy. You'll be able to do that look-up on the app. So on mobile, on a mobile device, [you’ll have] store-specific digital maps tied to a wish list, if you wish, that will populate a pin of where your books are in the store. And you can use that as a guiding tool while you're shopping inside our stores.
My take
Barnes & Noble remains a fascinating test-case for omni-channel retail. The ‘heart-of-the-community’ pitch from Boire is an interesting idea. Certainly the in-store experience in the US is markedly different to that which I’m used to in the UK, where there have been efforts made to replicate the cafe culture, but it’s not the same. The NOOK nightmare looks to be easing somewhat, although the digital experience is clearly still very much a work-in-progress. One to keep a close eye on.