Borders Adopts Category Management

Borders Group has reorganized its business operations to emphasize category management. As a result, Borders has broken down its business into specialized categories of books, children's, multimedia, gifts and stationery, periodicals, calendars and cafe. Each category has its own sales and marketing as well as merchandising team that will work in tandem with Borders and Borders.com--and increasingly with Waldenbooks. Before the change, sales, marketing and merchandising functions were aligned by type of outlet, i.e., Borders, Walden and Borders.com.

Kathryn Winkelhaus, president of Borders Group stores, emphasized to PW that one of the major benefits of adopting category management is the evaluation of the company's business, including everything from defining the company's important categories and identifying their strategic roles to viewing them from the customer's perspective. Tamara Heim, president of Borders Books & Music stores and Borders.com, said that the teams are "getting more intense about internal data" and doing "a lot of customer research."

Indeed, one of the aims of category management at Borders is to provide more data to allow the stores to respond better to customers as well as enable more focused financial accountability for individual categories.

Under the reorganization, Phil Ollila has been named v-p of merchandising for books, a position that is very similar to his old one, but which now includes bargain books and no longer includes children's books. Linda Jones is in charge of merchandising for the children's category, which includes children's books.

The sales and marketing v-p for books is Anne Kubek, former v-p of field human resources. Molly Sapp, the former v-p of store planning and design, will head up the sales and marketing teams for the children's, gifts and stationery, periodicals, calendars and cafe categories. In addition, Marilyn Slankard is now in charge of the new marketing group that helps each sales and marketing team. Her responsibilities include advertising, online marketing, editorial, creative services and national events and promotions.