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One of the core values of Dick Schulze, Founder of Best Buy<\/strong>, was \u201clearning from challenge and change\u201d \u2014 a prescient insight from a retail leader in the \u201980s who realized even then that in retail, especially in consumer electronics retail, there would be constant change. It\u2019s a tenet that the company\u2019s latest CEO, Corie Barry, kept front of mind as she took the helm in 2019, throughout the upheaval of the pandemic and into today.<\/p>\n In the five <\/strong>years since Barry became CEO, Best Buy has undergone a complete overhaul of nearly every part of its business<\/strong>, from the store experience to its tech stack and the way it manages its workforce, culminating in a rebrand late last year that reimagines the role Best Buy plays in consumers\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are the last consumer electronics retailer<\/strong>, so how we go to market and what\u2019s important to us \u2014 both product and experience \u2014 is very specific to our purpose,\u201d said Barry at the NRF Big Show in NYC. \u201cOur purpose is to bridge life through technology<\/strong>. That\u2019s not the tagline; that is literally why we exist on the planet. I think each of us in the retail industry have to be able to articulate the combination of product, of experience, of what we know about our customers and what matters to them. How do we uniquely embrace what we do well and bring it to market?\u201d<\/p>\n That is what Barry has spent the last five years doing. She shared the process, and the results, with her retail colleagues this week at the conference in a conversation with NRF President Matthew Shay.<\/p>\n According to Barry, \u201ceverything about our model has changed in some significant way over the last five years,\u201d including:<\/p>\n Barry said that all these changes, and others in the works, have been driven by feedback from consumers, as well as the company\u2019s employees and vendor partners. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s driven all this change is a consumer who shops incredibly differently than they used to and <\/em>has higher expectations<\/strong>,\u201d she said. \u201cCustomers are less brand loyal than they have ever been post-pandemic, because everyone got used to shopping lots of different places to get what they needed. They also are much more willing to try different experiences \u2014 when my dad started getting his groceries curbside, I knew the world had changed forever. The complexity now for our team is that it\u2019s never that we are serving one customer need or another; you are constantly ubiquitously serving humans who may need different experiences depending on what they\u2019re trying to solve that day<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n Add to that the fact that retail experiences are now being compared not just to those of competitors, but to any experience a consumer has: \u201cI might have a great experience on the Delta<\/strong> app, and I\u2019m going to expect that that technology will translate into what my retail experience looks like,\u201d said Barry. \u201cI [should] be able to track where my laundry machine is as you\u2019re delivering it to my home, because I can do it with a pizza. [Retailers] are constantly influenced by this amalgamation of the experiences of others, and you have to be magnetically dedicated to creating the very best solution service.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Part of the way Barry is enabling this at Best Buy is through the changes in how its workforce is managed. \u201cThe gig economy has changed the way many employees think about being in charge of their own careers,\u201d said Barry. \u201cIf that\u2019s the backdrop, then we\u2019re competing for talent against every industry, not just each other. <\/strong>So you have to have that mindset about what really is an employee looking for in their career, and how can we keep building the infrastructure that might make it happen?\u201d<\/p>\n By training employees in multiple areas of the business (curbside fulfillment and different sales sections like appliances or home theater, for example), the company is now able to deploy employees across multiple stores, thereby offering them the scheduling flexibility they want. The end result is happier employees, which translates into a better store experience for customers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a big shift, but it\u2019s part of the larger ethos that is driving the changes at Best Buy. \u201cWe all live in a world where simultaneous change is the new norm,\u201d said Barry. \u201cWhat I talk to the team about is this idea of adaptability over perfection.<\/strong> As retailers, we are used to daily scorecards, driving to the top of that scorecard and sending out a perfect SOP [standard operating procedure]. We\u2019re in a world where that actually can\u2019t be what my team strives for. What the team needs to strive for is adaptability, not the perfect answer. The faster they can try something, and if it doesn\u2019t work, talk about why it didn\u2019t work, learn from it and then move on to the next thing \u2014 and all of it in in service of a customer who is also rapidly changing.\u201d<\/p>\n These changes are all encompassed in the brand\u2019s new identity, anchored by the tagline, \u201cImagine That.\u201d The idea is that Best Buy doesn\u2019t need to be the expert anymore; instead, its central role is to aid consumers with discovery<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a somewhat counterintuitive vision for a retailer that for decades has positioned itself as the go-to expert for all things electronic, but Barry said it was developed based on three <\/strong>fundamental insights about consumers today:<\/p>\n These realizations understandably raised some hairy existential questions for Best Buy. \u201c[Our new tagline] for me embodies what we do need our people to do \u2014 to take what they know and translate it to what matters to the customer<\/strong>,\u201d said Barry. <\/p>\n \u201cWe [often] think about a brand as what you put on TV, how we want to show up every single day,\u201d she added. \u201cBut one of our board members asked me, \u2018How do you want people to feel<\/em> about your brand story?\u2019 I thought about it, and the best days in a Best Buy store [for me are when] I walk by an employee with a customer and I hear one phrase \u2014 \u2018I had no idea I could do that.\u2019 That\u2019s not about the thing; that is about how you translate it. That\u2019s what the brand stands for, and no one else does it the way that we do it in consumer electronics.<\/strong> So, I\u2019m really excited about the way we\u2019re coming to market, not because of the tagline, but because I think it is a beautiful embodiment of what\u2019s unique about Best Buy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nBest Buy from 2019 to 2024: \u2018Changing the Model Absolutely, Completely\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Aiming for Adaptability over Perfection<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u2018Imagine That\u2019: Bringing it all Together with a Rebrand<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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