Barry Judge // Updates from the CMO of Best Buy

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.  Read more...

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.  Read more...

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.  Read more...

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.  Read more...

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.  Read more...

Last Sunday we launched “Twelpforce,” a new service that enlists the passion and knowledge of Best Buy’s vast employee base to bring assistance directly to customer computer screens via the micro blogging site, Twitter. Staffed by Best Buy employees from across all operations, including BlueShirts and Geek Squad, Twelpforce^™ will answer product questions, troubleshoot technology challenges and solve customer service issues, all from the comfort of the users’ keyboard or mobile phone. Twelpforce has gotten a fair amount of awareness as evidenced by blog posts by both TechCrunch and Twitter themselves.

Twelpforce is obviously an experiment. A very public one. And with this publicity comes a certain amount of risk. In my view, it is a risk well worth taking for many reasons.  Read more...

So the idea submission and voting part of our crowd-sourcing experiment has been over for a few days. We have a few more stages to get through before we’re done, (re-posting the Emerging Media job, interviewing and hiring among other things) but wanted to get an update out especially for those who participated in submitting ideas, or participated in the conversation. There will yet be more updates to be posted here on this topic and more opportunity for commentary and conversation. My team helped me put this together as there was a lot of time involved in gathering up the links and getting them placed in the post.

Bob Roth (blogging at bigbadbobby.blogspot or @Zamees on Twitter) was officially the top vote getter as of the time voting was officially closed last Thursday. He was the winner with 18 votes at the time. Here is Bob’s Idea on our IdeaX site, and here is Bob’s blog post about that same idea. Also worth mentioning is that last week, according to our analytics, Bob’s idea had the most views of any idea on IdeaX.  Read more...

In marketing, we’re doing our job when we reach people at the right time in the right place with the right experience and message. As I talk about in my The Future is Digital blog and video, digital enables people to get information on their own terms: when, where, how, and what they want. It’s no longer enough to just say something; you have to let people experience it and share it with the people that they trust.

Our Musical Instruments department (in about 100 stores nationwide) is all about Experience. Everything is plugged in and ready to play. The staff is friendly, knowledgeable, and approachable. We carry professional grade gear from brands like Fender, Marshall, Roland, Yamaha, and Drum Workshop.  We are working on building awareness of our Musical Instruments department, but more importantly, building credibility and authenticity. We hope to inspire people. But how do you take that feeling and translate it to a digital landscape?  Read more...

My team brought me this idea in response to a post about Best Buy employees on Gizmodo yesterday. Frankly, I didn’t think it was that funny and wasn’t sure it aligned with my core values. I was excited though that the team was thinking about new ways to use new media so I have decided to support their thinking and publish it. So I will be curious to hear your feedback.

We are not sure how many of you read  Gizmodo, the uber gear and tech blog, but those of you who do read it likely noticed this post yesterday. While we would argue that the employees of Best Buy are far too diverse to fit into one of 7 categories (aspiring musicians, perhaps?), it was a pretty funny post. We couldn’t resist taking a stab at classifying the seven types of Gizmodo bloggers, but then we realized there’s really only one type of Gizmodo blogger. Here’s that description:  Read more...