Business Week just posted an article on Best Buy’s business strategy. I am interested in hearing comments on what people think about Business Week’s take on the article. The article is posted at the following link, http://tinyurl.com/yaokons. I have also posted it below.
Barry Judge // Updates from the CMO of Best Buy
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Communicating “Buyer Be Happy” This Holiday Part 3 – Give a Gift That Gives a Gift
If you’ve visited a Best Buy store in the past few weeks, you may have noticed a logo next to certain items designating them as an @15 Gift. I’ve mentioned @15 before, but am particularly proud of how Best Buy’s philanthropic platform is inviting our customers to partner with us, benefiting teens in our communities this holiday season.
Here’s how it works: every time a customer buys a product designated as an @15 Gift during the months of November and December, a portion of the sale will be donated by the manufacturer to the @15 FundTM within the Best Buy’s Children Foundation. Then teens are empowered to direct the $1 million fund to non-profits supporting other teens in our communities through http://www.at15.com/.
Communicating “Buyer Be Happy,” This Holiday Part 2
Our plan this Holiday focuses on executing very well our “Price Plus,” strategy. ” Price Plus” is shorthand for great prices plus providing the best help before and during the shopping process and then after you buy something via all our touch points in our stores, web sites and call centers. We know that delivering value in this manner is very appealing to consumers (see American Consumer Institute study on this at http://tinyurl.com/yhuu23p), and if we do it well, customers will be happy and so will we.
As I mentioned in the Part 1, we will be communicating our “Buyer Be Happy,” promise across both traditional TV and print mediums as well as making much more extensive use of email, digital, mobile and social mediums than we have in the past. The creative backdrop for our communication is our people as it has been for the past while. In all of our communication we will be providing helpful gift giving advice featuring the real people that work in our stores. This explosion in mediums has enabled us to do a lot of different things this year, particularly in using video on the web and in building gifting applications for Facebook and our Mobile platforms.
Holiday Greetings Messaging
You may be aware that the reference to the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Ahda in our 11/22 Best Buy Sunday newspaper insert (for U.S. Best Buy stores) has spurred a number of conversations in the blogosphere and on Best Buy’s Facebook site. We’ve also seen an increase in the volume of calls and e-mails to Enterprise Customer Care.
In light of this, I wanted to make sure people understand our strategy related to holiday greetings.
First and foremost, Best Buy is committed to living our values and creating an inclusive environment for customers and employees. Therefore, as we continue striving to better understand our customers in order meet their unique needs, it’s only natural that we would look for ways to communicate to them about the things that are important in their lives. At this time of year, that means acknowledging the various holidays in which gifts traditionally are exchanged.
Communicating “Buyer Be Happy” This Holiday – Part 1
Its been a while since I posted but I am finally back. Writing a blog gives you new found respect for journalists who do this for a living. Its hard work! I am going to try to post weekly through the New Year. We’ll see how that goes.
Anyway, I’m very excited about what we are doing across the business for the Holidays. Our plan has never been stronger – and it needs to be given consumers’ expectations and the strength of the competition across all of Retail. Our plan focuses on executing very well our “Price Plus,” strategy. ” Price Plus” is shorthand for great prices plus providing the best help before and during the shopping process and then after you buy something via all our touch points in our stores, web sites and call centers. We know that delivering value in this manner is very appealing to consumers (see American Consumer Institute study on this at http://tinyurl.com/yhuu23p), and if we do it well, customers will be happy and so will we.
Mofilm and User Generated Content
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about our commitment to e-recycling, and participation in the MOFILM user-generated advertising competition. The call for entries just ended and we’re in the process of reviewing all of the submissions.
We’re really excited to see how the aspiring creative directors and filmmakers can help us think of new ways to communicate our commitment to sustainability. We’ll share some of the submissions with you over the next several days. Later this week, we’re asking you to be even more involved in our selection and starting on Thursday this week, you will be able to pick your favorite submission from the MOFILM competition at www.bestbuyvote.com. I encourage you to check it out and give us your vote.
Mofilm and efforts in recycling
Early in the year, I talked about our promise to make a difference through our recycling efforts as a company. It’s astonishing that the US discards an estimated 400 million units of electronics each year, according to the US EPA and we recognize our ability to help make a difference. We work hard at delivering that promise every day through our commitment to be “Greener Together” with our customers.
One of the most important ways we try to make a difference is by providing our customers an environmentally responsible way to dispose of electronics through our Trade-In and In-store recycling. For nearly a decade, we’ve offered a variety of recycling options in all of our US stores. In just our first year of our latest program, where consumers can drop off items at our stores for recycling, we’re going to recycle more than 1 million units, or more than 50 million pounds. We know this makes a difference, but there’s more to do.
True Stories – Back To School Campaign
Since last December, we have been airing a campaign featuring real stories of how our people helped customers solve a technology problem they had in their lives. Since the campaign tells stories about real situations and includes the actual employee from the story, we call the campaign, True Stories. I have attached the final versions that are running on TV (Max and Chris) and the Web (Shirley and Sultan). This work compliments our “Twelpforce” TV and Web campaign which I discussed in an earlier post.
The intent for our communication messaging is to convey three important ideas. One, you can trust us to always have your best interests in mind. Two, we have a unique take on how technology and entertainment can make your life better and finally, you can always expect to find great prices. Ultimately our expectation is that, you walk out of the store happier, than when you came in.
Best Buy’s @15 Program and Taylor Swift
- Image via Wikipedia
Last year Best Buy sharpened its focus in corporate philanthropy to attend to the under-served segment of young teens. While we as a society focus a lot of time and financial resources on kids at the younger (<12) and older (>18) end of the spectrum, there’s ironically a lot less support for young people at arguably the most transformational time of their life, between the ages of 12 and 16. Coincidentally, those aged kids are pretty tuned into Best Buy, and pretty important to our business. So we launched @15, our ‘brand’ of philanthropy, and we’ve been directing all of our charitable giving and social change energy towards giving teens a voice and opportunities to pursue their dreams ever since.
Emerging Media Role – The Crowdsourced Job Posting is Live
We’ve gone through all of your ideas, added some of our own, and we’ve posted the job opening for the Senior Manager Emerging Media Marketing on our careers site.
For those of you who submitted ideas, your contributions will be largely found in the qualifications section specifically. After all, the qualification of 250+ twitter followers is what started us down this road in the first place. We haven’t taken your qualification ideas and copied them down to the letter. Instead we tried to take the essence of them where appropriate and incorporate the combined spirit of them into the posting.
At some point in the future, after we’ve made our hire, we’ll share our thoughts on why we chose what we did, what informed those decisions, as well as some other elements that we’ve included in our process (from your ideas) that we can’t give out at this stage.