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B&M's new combined customer-marketing role under ex-Matalan CMO Dewhurst signals a shift from store-count growth to precision targeting as margin pressure mounts in home goods.
1,200
stores across the UK and France
£380m
in net cash with no drawn debt
38%
of revenue—a category where luxury-hospitality procurement teams increasingly source…
2.1 million
active users who contributed
B&M Stores, the Liverpool-based value retailer operating 1,200 stores across the UK and France, created a combined customer and marketing director position and installed Charlotte Dewhurst to fill it. Dewhurst spent the past four years as marketing director at Matalan, the £900m-revenue apparel-and-homewares discounter, where she led brand repositioning work and omnichannel customer acquisition during a period of declining high-street footfall.
The new role consolidates brand strategy, media buying, customer data operations, and loyalty-program oversight under one executive reporting directly to CEO Alex Russo. B&M does not operate a traditional loyalty scheme in most markets but runs seasonal promotional campaigns tied to its "Big Brands for Less" positioning. The company posted £5.3bn in revenue for the fiscal year ending March 2024, up 4.7% year-on-year, driven primarily by store-count expansion rather than like-for-like sales growth. Gross margin compression in home goods—a core category—has pushed management to refine targeting and reduce waste in above-the-line spend.
The appointment signals a structural bet that customer acquisition and brand perception require unified command in an environment where value-conscious shoppers toggle between Aldi, Home Bargains, and B&M based on weekly flyer promotions rather than sustained brand affinity. Dewhurst's Matalan tenure overlapped with that chain's shift from purely transactional TV advertising to performance-driven digital campaigns with measurable attribution windows. B&M's historical reliance on out-of-home and circular inserts leaves room for reallocation toward addressable channels, particularly as the retailer's customer base skews older and less digitally native than pure-play discounters.
Family-office principals and hospitality-development teams tracking UK consumer discretionary trends should note three dynamics. First, B&M's store-expansion plan targets fifty net new locations through March 2025, concentrated in underserved commuter towns where land costs remain favorable and competition from Tesco and Sainsbury's Local formats is thin. Second, the company holds £380m in net cash with no drawn debt, providing runway for both organic growth and potential acquisition of distressed retail boxes. Third, homewares and seasonal décor represent 38% of revenue—a category where luxury-hospitality procurement teams increasingly source prototyping materials and trend signals ahead of commissioning bespoke runs from Italian or Portuguese manufacturers.
Dewhurst's immediate mandate will center on sharpening customer segmentation within B&M's unusually broad demographic aperture, which spans pensioners buying garden furniture and young families stocking pantries. The retailer's data infrastructure lags competitors; it lacks a proprietary app and runs no subscription or click-and-collect service in the UK. Matalan launched its app-based loyalty program in late 2022, eventually enrolling 2.1 million active users who contributed 31% of total sales by early 2024. Whether Dewhurst pursues a similar build at B&M or focuses purely on tightening paid-media efficiency remains the open question.
Allocators should watch for three follow-on events in the next six to nine months. First, any announcement of a customer-data-platform vendor selection or pilot loyalty scheme in a subset of stores, which would require board approval and likely surface in quarterly trading statements. Second, shifts in B&M's media mix toward programmatic display and connected TV, measurable through Kantar or Nielsen ad-spend trackers updated monthly. Third, partnerships with aggregator platforms like Too Good To Go or Olio for end-of-line clearance, a low-cost customer-acquisition tactic Dewhurst explored at Matalan and which B&M has not yet deployed at scale.
B&M's full-year results in May 2025 will be the first quantitative test of whether consolidating customer and marketing functions yields measurable improvement in cost-per-acquisition or average basket size, the two metrics Russo has emphasized in recent earnings calls.
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