One of the core values of Dick Schulze, Founder of Best Buy, was “learning from challenge and change” — a prescient insight from a retail leader in the ’80s who realized even then that in retail, especially in consumer electronics retail, there would be constant change. It’s a tenet that the company’s latest CEO, Corie Barry, kept front of mind as she took the helm in 2019, throughout the upheaval of the pandemic and into today.
In the five years since Barry became CEO, Best Buy has undergone a complete overhaul of nearly every part of its business, 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’ lives.
“We are the last consumer electronics retailer, so how we go to market and what’s important to us — both product and experience — is very specific to our purpose,” said Barry at the NRF Big Show in NYC. “Our purpose is to bridge life through technology. That’s 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?”
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.
Best Buy from 2019 to 2024: ‘Changing the Model Absolutely, Completely’
According to Barry, “everything about our model has changed in some significant way over the last five years,” including:
- Major investments in the company’s digital experiences, in particular its consumer app to make it “stickier, better for discovery and better able to help customers understand what technology can do,” said Barry;
- An overhaul of the store experience to shift away from a chainwide approach and tailor each store to its market. “It used to be all stores were ubiquitous experiences — you knocked out 100 of them across the nation, and they were all relatively the same,” she said. “Now one store might specialize in store pickup, because that is exactly what it’s there to do, and one store might specialize in the complete experience for our customers, all the bells and whistles.” That makes each store more effective for customers, but it also adds complexity for Best Buy, which is now managing a footprint of 900 stores that all are “slightly different,” acknowledged Barry;
- To meet that complexity, Best Buy also overhauled how it manages its workforce, assigning employees to a market rather than a specific store. “They might serve four different stores, and depending on how the demand profile changes, the leaders as well will rotate around the stores. That serves a market and does a much better job serving our communities,” Barry explained;
- The addition of a retail media network; and
- Plans to launch a new third-party marketplace this year.
Aiming for Adaptability over Perfection
Barry said that all these changes, and others in the works, have been driven by feedback from consumers, as well as the company’s employees and vendor partners.
“What’s driven all this change is a consumer who shops incredibly differently than they used to and has higher expectations,” she said. “Customers 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 — when my dad started getting his groceries curbside, I knew the world had changed forever. The complexity now for our team is that it’s 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’re trying to solve that day.”
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: “I might have a great experience on the Delta app, and I’m going to expect that that technology will translate into what my retail experience looks like,” said Barry. “I [should] be able to track where my laundry machine is as you’re 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.”
Part of the way Barry is enabling this at Best Buy is through the changes in how its workforce is managed. “The gig economy has changed the way many employees think about being in charge of their own careers,” said Barry. “If that’s the backdrop, then we’re competing for talent against every industry, not just each other. 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?”
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.
It’s a big shift, but it’s part of the larger ethos that is driving the changes at Best Buy. “We all live in a world where simultaneous change is the new norm,” said Barry. “What I talk to the team about is this idea of adaptability over perfection. 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’re in a world where that actually can’t 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’t work, talk about why it didn’t work, learn from it and then move on to the next thing — and all of it in in service of a customer who is also rapidly changing.”
‘Imagine That’: Bringing it all Together with a Rebrand
These changes are all encompassed in the brand’s new identity, anchored by the tagline, “Imagine That.” The idea is that Best Buy doesn’t need to be the expert anymore; instead, its central role is to aid consumers with discovery.
It’s 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 fundamental insights about consumers today:
- Coming out the pandemic, some of the joy has been stripped out of retail;
- Technology has become so ubiquitous in our lives that it has lost some of its sparkle; and
- Consumers don’t need technical experts like they used to; they have the internet now and they’re pretty good at using it.
These realizations understandably raised some hairy existential questions for Best Buy. “[Our new tagline] for me embodies what we do need our people to do — to take what they know and translate it to what matters to the customer,” said Barry.
“We [often] think about a brand as what you put on TV, how we want to show up every single day,” she added. “But one of our board members asked me, ‘How do you want people to feel about your brand story?’ 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 — ‘I had no idea I could do that.’ That’s not about the thing; that is about how you translate it. That’s what the brand stands for, and no one else does it the way that we do it in consumer electronics. So, I’m really excited about the way we’re coming to market, not because of the tagline, but because I think it is a beautiful embodiment of what’s unique about Best Buy.”