Richard Lawton oversees the company’s activities in marketing analysis, category management, field assignment administration, corporate communications, staff development, human resources and related administrative areas.
He joined CMG in 2003 with a mandate to improve the organization’s use of information in support of sales and marketing efforts, so as to better meet the evolving needs of retailers, wholesale distributors and client publishers. In pursuit of this goal, Lawton directs CMG’s various data initiatives, such as category management and marketing analysis, to provide more comprehensive and “actionable” reporting structures across the company. He has spearheaded the company’s draw optimization efforts on behalf of client publishers, and often represents CMG at industry events, where he advocates for increased attention the effects of excess print order on a publisher’s overall profitability. Lawton currently chairs the Magazine Publishers of America’s Retail Efficiency Committee and serves as a Vice President of the Periodical and Booksellers Association.
Lawton joined CMG after serving as Vice President, Newsstand Sales Division, for Barnes & Noble, where he made significant contributions to the chain’s achievement of a 50% increase in newsstand revenues from 1997 to 2002, while also increasing sales efficiency levels from 40% to an industry-leading 54% during the same time period. In addition to making numerous operational improvements in the retailer’s operations, such as instituting an automatic replenishment system and holding suppliers to increasingly higher levels of service, he set new standards for the use of issue-specific, point-of-sale data. He also oversaw the development of B&N’s industry-leading scan-based trading system. Lawton spent the first 16 years of his career with Time Distribution Services (TDS) in a number of sales management and executive positions. In 1999, he was named one of the “FOLIO 40” magazine industry innovators by FOLIO: magazine.
Lawton attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and Clemson University in South Carolina, from which he is a cum laude graduate. He makes his home in Point Pleasant Beach, NJ.