Clients & Case Histories
Best Buy
Barry JudgeWe are an entrepreneurial company and culture that has resisted the confines of a single brand focus. But Tait Subler was able to help us clarify a distilled position and mission for our brand (and our employees) that actually takes our biggest asset, our size, and turns it into a highly differentiated and leverageable weapon. The new Best Buy brand theme is a critical foundation for, and an accelerant to, our incredibly aggressive growth plans.
Chief Marketing Officer
The Challenge
Best Buy has become the dominant technology and entertainment retailer in the U.S. with sales of over $35 billion. While the business model and the culture of the organization have proven to be an incredibly potent market force, management felt that they wanted the brand itself to “live up to the success of the business and drive greater irrational loyalty with our customers.” While the company was clearly seen as the “biggest” and “dominant” brand in their category, management felt the brand was underleveraged as a competitive asset.
Most important, the client wanted a brand strategy that could work as an organizing principle and rallying cry internally as much as a positioning tool externally…a true brand theme.
What We Did
First, we worked closely with quantitative research consultants to glean as much from their segmentation work as possible before launching into our process. Next, we conducted off-site brainstorming sessions with the organization’s top leaders to create targeting and brand theme hypotheses. Then we conducted similar sessions with all levels of management and store employees. In-store ethnographic research was done to better understand key need-states. Finally, focus groups with key attitudinally-derived segments were conducted.
The Outcome
Our recommended brand theme clearly articulated exactly how Best Buy could leverage its position as the “biggest” into a position of leadership to inspire both employees and consumers. Further we defined a clear badge for the brand around a particular lifestyle, giving Best Buy more aspirational power.
The brand theme is being used by the company’s operational leadership to shape the overall customer experience.