The Discount vs. Full-Range Leadership Challenge
- Marion Heil
- 31. Okt. 2025
- 3 Min. Lesezeit
A few weeks ago I was at an event, and I ended up in a conversation with a leader of a major food retailer. We were talking about a leader transition that had, to put it kindly, not gone the way they had hoped. The candidate had been excellent. The track record was real. The references had all checked out. "So what happened?" I asked. He paused for a moment and said: "I think we hired the wrong kind of good."
"I think we hired the wrong kind of good."
That phrase stayed with me, because it describes something we have seen in different processes: a very strong retail CEO candidate walks into a board's shortlist process, the chemistry is excellent, the track record is impressive, and then quietly, somewhere in the third interview, it starts to unravel.
Not because the candidate isn't good. Because the candidate is “the wrong kind of good”.
Retail is one of those sectors where "retail experience" gets treated as a single, transferable credential. It often isn't. And nowhere is this more visible than in the gap between discount and premium/full-range leadership.
Retail is one of those sectors where "retail experience" gets treated as a single, transferable credential. It often isn't.
Let me explain what I mean.
A discount retailer, whether we are talking about the hard discounters like Aldi and Lidl or the softer variety, is built on a fundamentally different operating logic than a Vollsortimenter like Rewe, Carrefour, or Migros. Discount is about reducing complexity to an art form. Fewer SKUs, tighter supplier relationships, relentless cost control, and an almost philosophical commitment to the idea that less is more. The CEO of a discount operation needs to be an exceptional operator, someone who finds beauty in standardization and loses sleep over a one percent deviation in shrinkage.
A premium / full-range retailer is a different animal entirely. Range complexity is not a problem to be solved, it is the business model. Category management, supplier negotiation across thousands of lines, format diversity, private label strategy, and the constant balancing act between own-brand and branded goods. The CEO here needs to be comfortable with ambiguity at scale, and comfortable with the politics that comes with it.
A discount retailer is built on a fundamentally different operating logic than a Vollsortimenter (premium/full-range retailer).
These are not always the same leadership profiles. They are related, in the way that a sprinter and a marathon runner are both athletes.
Where this becomes a real problem is in succession planning and external search. Boards, understandably, gravitate toward candidates who have led large retail organizations. But they sometimes underestimate how much the operating model shapes the leader.
A highly successful MD from a discount background, dropped into a full-range turnaround, might default to what they know. They might try to reduce complexity in an environment where complexity is the point. And the reverse is equally true: a premium full-range operator in a discount mandate might struggle with the discipline required when there is genuinely nothing to fall back on except efficiency.
I am not saying transitions never work. They do, with the right candidate and the right support. But they require a different kind of search, a different briefing process, and a board that is honest about what it actually needs rather than what looks good on paper.
The question I always ask a retail board early in a mandate is this: are you looking for someone to run this business, or to change it? The answer determines everything. Including which candidate pool we should even be looking at.
Are you looking for someone to run this business, or to change it? The answer determines everything.
Retail is a humbling sector. It moves fast, margins are unforgiving, and consumers are entirely unsentimental. Getting the leadership profile right is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a successful tenure and an expensive lesson.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marion Heil is the founder and managing director of Board+CEO Advisors, a Vienna-based executive search and board advisory boutique. She advises listed companies, family businesses and investors on C-suite, leaders and supervisory board appointments across DACH and CEE.
