Barry Judge // Updates from the CMO of Best Buy

Every time I think I’ve heard the best story yet about how one of our people helped a customer, I hear an even better one. Today I’m posting a new “True Stories” TV ad that is just that kind of story. It shows that you never know where the next Best Buy customer might come from, and that price parity is just the starting point in a consumer’s definition of value.

At Best Buy, we are very bullish about our future, but that doesn’t make us complacent. We are vying for every customer out there. To us the battlegrounds are service, selection, value and price. Customers will see us continue to be aggressive on price and continue to improve our competitive position, but price matching is really just the cost of admission. Best Buy is putting its energy into the higher value differentiators that independent surveys and our own research tell us that customers — especially former Circuit City customers — prefer. Service, selection and value. I call this “Dream Support.”  Read more...

Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, once told me “the easier you make it for customers to complain, the better your product will become.” Those words have really stuck with me. I would add that you also have to be “open” to really hear what people are saying and then the “will” to do something about it.  This is hard even in our personal lives. I call this being accessible and I think being great at “accessibility,” could be a powerful differentiator, at least for Best Buy.

These days, it’s easy to be more accessible. Truly, the only limitations are cultural. We are doing a lot of experiments in being more accessible. Our latest test, Best Buy IdeaXchange, is a web site that is intended to enable consumers (and employees) to give us feedback on what they would like to see us do to make Best Buy a better place to shop.  The idea was born frm watching what Dell and Starbucks have done to encourage open consumer input. The site will live off of BestBuy.com when we get past Beta. I would love your feedback in this test phase. Here’s a link to BestBuy IdeaX  Read more...

Clearly, we are in the midst of exciting and challenging change all around us.   Lately, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the Best Buy Brand and how we best compete in this economic time. In addition, I know that the ways in which to understand consumer behavior and how consumers learn about Brands is much different today than it was even a year ago. As evidence of how fast this change is coming I can make it personal.  I had never even heard of Twitter and a blog was the furthest thing from my mind, trust me.  Anyway, as a means to collect my thoughts and communicate them primarily to my team, earlier this week,  Chris Barry (Tremendously talented Yellow Tag producer) and I had a video conversation about my take on the future of Best Buy marketing. The 4 minute video follows this piece and I would very much like you to share your feedback. Thanks for the time if you do.  Read more...

Since we launched our “True Stories” communication platform in November, it has become my custom to post the “rough cut” TV execution options prior to us making the final decision. In prior posts, we have gotten excellent feedback – comments that have made our messaging clearer as well as input in helping us choose the actual spots to run.  So in keeping with this new way (for me) in getting feedback, the following are TV rough cut executions we are considering for the Spring. These ads are indeed rough – we have not included the music or background images as we do not have clearance yet for these pieces.  I learned this lesson the hard way in November (see November posts).  Thus, please react primarily to the story and the story teller as the music and the images will make the ads significantaly more interesting.  Read more...