Building the Commercial Case for Range Strategy
Sainsbury's wanted to be a quality children's bookseller. The sales data said otherwise. Book sales were sluggish, the range was inconsistent across store types, and the in-store experience wasn't working. The aspiration existed. The evidence base to act on it didn't.
This was a dual-client engagement. Sainsbury's needed a stronger commercial position in children's books. Penguin Random House needed to understand where its own opportunity sat within that. Both problems had to be solved from the same dataset.
The starting point was data that already existed: customer loyalty card records, inventory and sales data by store type, floor space and shelf layout plans, and market benchmarks. None of it had been synthesised into a picture of what was actually happening, who was buying, and why the category was underdelivering.
The first task was diagnostic. I analysed inventory and sales performance against market benchmarks, identifying where Sainsbury's was losing ground and why. The curation was inconsistent. The display wasn't working. The titles on shelf didn't reflect what the most loyal buyers actually wanted.
The loyalty card data was the most valuable asset. It allowed me to profile the actual children's book buyer rather than assume one, and the profile reframed the problem. The primary purchaser was not the parent browsing with a child. It was grandparents and family shoppers, buying across a predictable age range with recognisable titles as a trust signal. The range wasn't built for them.
I also pulled crossover data from stronger-performing categories, particularly children's clothing, to understand where the loyal family shopper was already spending and what that implied for range positioning and display placement.
From there I worked across Insights, Sales, and Finance to develop recommendations that were commercially stress-tested before they were presented. Feasibility assessment filtered out what wouldn't land.
The output included a defined target market, a curation framework built around recognisable titles and standardised KPIs, and a proposal for a supermarket-branded educational series developed with Penguin's in-house educational publisher: accessible price point, broad appeal, and D2C potential for Penguin beyond the Sainsbury's shelf.
The target age range was narrowed to 0 to 9 years, aligning the range with the actual buyer and their gifting behaviour. Curation improved immediately, with stronger and more recognisable titles replacing an inconsistent selection. Displays became more prominent and more coherent. Sales lifted.
The educational range was launched. And Sainsbury's was awarded Children's Bookseller of the Year.
The project demonstrated something that applies beyond the category: when loyalty data, sales data, and market benchmarks are synthesised rather than held separately, the answer to a commercial problem is usually already in the room.
