Davis ThinkingMaytag’s century-old brand owes much of its equity to Ol’ Lonely, a lethargic Mayberry gent in a blue jumpsuit and replica 40s policeman's cap. Created by Leo Burnett in the late 60s, the ad campaign’s clever premise - expert repair services you’ll never need – emphasizes the brand’s dependability promise.
Best Buy should use Dunn’s departure as an opportunity to rethink how it sells gadgets. In particular, it’s time to abandon the idea of endless selection. If Best Buy wants to survive, it’s got to replace its hulking, teeming stores with smaller, less crowded, more intimate spaces.
When Best Buy Co. (BBY) said yesterday it was closing 50 big stores and opening 100 smaller ones, the world’s largest electronics retailer was adjusting to reality: The era of big-box retail dominance is coming to an end. The new mantra is small box.
Best Buy is on the same track that two former train wrecks were on, CompUSA and Circuit City. Today, Best Buy reported a fiscal fourth-quarter net loss of $1.7 billion and announced it is closing 50 stores. The basic pattern that CompUSA (closed brick-and-mortar stores in 2007) and Circuit City (closed stores in 2008) followed was: first select stores were closed, then more were closed, then all stores were shuttered or sold off.
Customers, employees, shareholders and taxpayers hate large corporations for many reasons. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed a lengthy list of corporations for which there is substantial research data to choose the 10 most hated in America.
I was on an overseas business trip early this year when my phone began ringing at 4 AM. The first person to reach me was Best Buy’s VP of operations, but she wasn’t the last—I received a quick series of panicked calls. The “crisis” we needed to manage involved my Twitter account.
In May, Google announced its interactive TV platform that brings a search box, internet browser and apps to TV viewing, though it has kept quiet on what we can expect from the device. Now, weeks before it ships, Google has launched a website to outline the new features and its media partnerships. Here's what you need to know about Google TV.
Marketers need to stop blasting messages to consumers and, instead, listen to them. So says Diane Hessan, president and CEO of Communispace, a 10-year-old company in Watertown, Mass., that creates online communities for marketers such as Kraft, Best Buy, Verizon and Mattel. These companies pay Communispace up to $25,000 a month to help them create and communicate with customers online for market research and feedback. Communispace pulled in $37 million in revenue in 2009, up 17% from the year before, according to the Honomichl Top 50 Report of U.S. Marketing Research Firms. Forbes' Ken Brunospoke with Hessan about online customer engagement and how it has changed over the past decade.
When it comes to mobile, the ad industry has seemed stuck in its own version of Waiting for Godot. Each year for the past decade, the industry has hyped mobile’s great potential, only to face myriad technical and business obstacles. Now, thanks to advancements by Apple and innovations by Google, mobile has arrived as a truly effective platform for brands.
Best Buy is aiming to change the way consumers watch films with the launch of its "Movie Mode" mobile app this week. The free download, which is being released in conjunction with 3-D film Despicable Me (in theaters July 9), provides an interactive interface that unlocks exclusive digital content. During the end credits, viewers who download the app get a translation of the chatter of the minion characters in Despicable Me.
“We’ve been waiting a long time for today,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is presiding over a power panel of CEOs helping to make Google TV possible. The panel, at Google I/O, includes the CEOs of Sony, Best Buy, Echostar, Adobe, Logitech, and, of course, Google. He needs all of them, as well as developers, to make his new Google TV a hit.
US retailers have become engaged in a battle for hearts and mobiles. As leading retailers, including Walmart and JC Penney, continue to grapple with the potential of the internet, the proliferation of smartphones has inevitably caught their attention. Three years after Apple launched its first iPhone, mobile connectivity is shaking up the way retailers do business, not only online but in their stores.
Sometime early next week when you walk into the electronics section of your local Wal-Mart, you're likely to notice some changes. More big name brands of TVs, Blu-ray players, smartphones, and other gadgets will begin to populate the store shelves as the retailing giant tries to expand its reach and customer base even further. The new products will include the latest in TV technology, meaning displays with LED backlighting and Internet connections, Web-connected Blu-ray players, and home networking equipment. There's also going to be more emphasis on getting the trendiest smartphones from carriers on the first day they're available elsewhere, and more accessible mobile broadband plans.
Best Buy, already the largest electronics retailer in the United States, is opening 1500-square foot mobile stores in shopping malls in an attempt to grab a larger share of the mobile phone market. The chain has already opened 77 such stores and plans to open as many as 1,000. The move creates an interesting challenge for the brand, which will now compete more directly with Walmart and Radio Shack (recently relabeled "The Shack"). Walmart has about a third and Radio Shack about a quarter of the U.S. mobile market.
Twitter’s advertising model is no longer under wraps. The social-networking site’s ad plan, Promoted Tweets, launches today and will work a lot like Google’s AdWords. When users search Twitter for keywords and what people are talking about, Twitter will run ads that marketers have bought to run against the search. The San Francisco company also plans to display promoted posts in streams of relevant user posts
Twitter will unveil on Tuesday a much-anticipated plan for making money from advertising, finally answering the question of how the company expects to turn its exponential growth into revenue. The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.
Customer retention has been an area of marketing focus for many companies this past year. To combat a widespread reticence to spend during the recession, many brands beefed up their existing loyalty programs to meet consumers' needs. Loyalty programs at some big-box stores have become more elaborate and offer more rewards and discounts than in the past.
Walmart topped the list of the most valuable retail brands in the U.S., followed by Target and Best Buy, per a new report issued by Interbrand today (Thursday). The report, compiled by Interbrand Design Forum—a division of the global brand consultancy, ranks retailers based on the value of their brands. The ranking is based on a number of factors: financial forecasting, the percentage of sales and profit that can directly be attributed to branding, and brand strength. These form a net present value, or the economic value of a brand.
The recession is forcing cash-poor consumers to stick to the basics when they shop, according to a list of the most valuable U.S. retail brands as ranked by Interbrand. In its 2010 list no-frills retailers, including Dollar General, Family Dollar, AutoZone and other retailers that sell necessities, rose in this annual ranking of 50 brands. Many top retail brands that sell niceties consumers can do without in hard times, including Avon and Polo Ralph Lauren, fell on the Interbrand list.
I’ve always had an easy time making decisions. I have this philosophy that “any decision is always better than no decision.” In fact, laboring over a decision makes me feel unsettled. I usually gather as much of the facts as possible, but I have to admit I have a pretty trustful gut and often that is all I need. We all have instinct. The decision we have to make is whether to use it or not.
Retailer hhgregg Inc., long a Midwest consumer electronics star, is moving aggressively to capitalize on cheaper rents during the economic downturn by building a nation-wide presence to challenge much bigger rival Best Buy Co. The Indianapolis company will open 40 to 45 stores in the Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore areas in coming months as part of a broader plan to expand to 600 stores this decade from 127 currently. In some cases it is getting cut-rate rentals on locations once held by Circuit City Stores Inc., which closed last year.
Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows 7 operating system has fattened the company's earnings and boosted personal-computer sales at retailers like Best Buy Co. But it hasn't increased the profits of PC giants Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and others. While consumers purchased more than 90 million new PCs during the holiday quarter, when Microsoft released Windows 7, up 22% from a year earlier, PC revenue grew at just a single-digit rate, analysts say.
When Barry Judge, chief marketing officer of Best Buy, started his Twitter feed in mid-2008, he was anxious. He recalls fretting: "What if my tweets are boring, and what if no one follows me?" He had worked at Best Buy for more than eight years at that point but he was a social media neophyte. Now Judge finds himself tweeting a couple times a day. He has nearly 14,000 followers. Now he can't imagine doing his job without using social media, which he uses to communicate with Best Buy colleagues and customers.
As a relatively subdued last-minute rush brought pre-Christmas shopping to a close, retailers were hoping to entice procrastinating consumers to keep on buying through the holiday and after. More retailers planned Internet sales on Christmas Day this year in an attempt to cash in on the growth of e-commerce, one of the few bright spots in an otherwise lackluster holiday shopping season. Shoppers and stores have engaged in a tug-of-war this year, as consumers postponed shopping in hopes of deep discounts and retailers tried to preserve their profit margins, offering limited deals designed to drive traffic into stores.
Best Buy, recently forced into a holiday shopping price war with retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart after suffering a 77% seasonal earnings drop in 2008, remains the largest US electronics retail chain, with about 1,000 stores. As is true for other retailers, the carnage hasn't stopped; Best Buy's net earnings for its second fiscal year quarter, which ended August 2009, fell 22% from the prior-year period.
Ford Motor Co. is expanding its partnership with Best Buy after a pilot program in Dallas resulted in increasing consideration among participants for all Ford brands. Ford dealerships will now work with local Best Buy stores in Pennsylvania and California to kick off independent customer clinics. About 70% of those who participated in the demos over the past 30 days say they are now more likely to consider buying a Ford, Lincoln or Mercury product. About 80% said that understanding how to use the hands-free Ford Sync system improved their overall opinion of Ford.
Looking for a good flick to watch tonight? Visit Instantwatcher, which marries New York Times critics' picks with the Netflix streaming-movie catalog. Interested in updating your music collection? Visit ArtistExplorer, which combines the Billboard charts with BestBuy.com's inventory database. Neither Netflix nor Best Buy made the applications—but both made them possible by opening up their APIs. You've likely been hearing a lot about APIs lately, and the concept isn't as confusing as it sounds. An open API simply means you've launched an interface that lets third-party software interact with your data; and those third parties can then mash the data up and build useful new tools on top of it.
America’s first Twitter Christmas got under way in earnest on Friday. Across the land, retailers and their customers used the social networking site to talk to one another about bargains, problems, purchases and shopping strategies.
Major retailers including Target Corp., J.C. Penney Co. and Best Buy Co. are cranking up promotions to avoid a slump after Black Friday and keep customers shopping through what promises to be a difficult season. The weak economy and growing clout of online sellers is upending carefully calculated promotions and positioning retailers' Web sites as the frontline in this year's competition.
Attention shoppers: It might pay to just sleep in this Black Friday. The conventional wisdom is that the most stupendous bargains of the year are to be had on the Friday after Thanksgiving. But the marketplace has become so packed on that crowded shopping day that some retailers are shifting their strategy. Deals on certain products are likely to be just as good, perhaps even better, in the days and weeks after Friday. In this economy, retailers need to stand out — and some of them are betting they can do so by offering bargains later in the season. Also, while chains are not discounting as deeply as last year, they know the primary way to get penny-pinching consumers to spend is to keep the deals coming all season long.
Digital is so yesterday. It will soon be 20 years since the advent of commercially available digital services such as America Online, multimedia, mobile phones and widespread use of personal computers. The American household went digital long before marketers embraced technology and the Internet. Now, as companies struggle to get their "digital strategies" in order, they will be surprised to discover consumers have moved on to the "post-digital" age.
As the high season of holiday shopping pain (or gain) arrives, I find myself fixated -- perhaps irrationally, and certainly emotionally -- on Best Buy's Twelpforce. This is the viral army of 2,200 Best Buy employees who answer questions and solve customer problems via the customer-care channel we know as Twitter. Self described as "a collective force of Best Buy tech pros offering tech advice in Tweet form," the program has nearly 15,000 "followers" and it's growing. Think Apple Genius Bar but without the physical counter.
From a holistic perspective, we talk about the need for organizations to become more socially calibrated—able to adapt and respond to changes both externally and internally. The three areas where emergent outcomes can manifest are, participation with your customers, collaboration between your employees and optimization in the interactions/transactions between your business and its partners. Digging into customer participation, it’s clear that in a networked economy customers demand engagement, information, support and ultimately, value and ecosystems such as Twitter are beginning to deliver here.
Get a bunch of longtime chief marketing officers in a room and you'll hear one thing for certain: lots and lots of questions about staying power. The Association of National Advertisers CMO Roundtable this past weekend was no exception. The group, comprised of Best Buy's Barry Judge, General Mills' Mark Addicks, Con Agra's Joan Chow and Fidelity Investment's Jim Speros, underscored the importance of transparency, relationship building and making sure you're right for the job in the first place.
Health-care reform? A Taliban cease-fire? Dick Cheney unloading on George Bush? The hottest story on the web today was none of the above. Burning up the blogosphere and Twitter was the remarkable "pricing error" that occurred on the website for electronics retailer Best Buy, which -- for a little while, anyway -- had a 52-inch Samsung high-definition TV listed for $9.99.
Best Buy got props on Sunday when its weekly supplement came equipped with a 3-D notebook computer -- that is, if you had a webcam and held the circular up to it, you'd see a 3-D image of a Toshiba laptop, thanks to the technology known as augmented reality.
When it comes to the future of consumer electronics, Best Buy says individual gadgets don't mean as much as marketers think they do. Instead, "we see tremendous opportunity around how those devices work with each other, and with content people already own," says Shari Ballard, EVP/retail channel management for the Minneapolis-based chain. "People are trying to do things with their technology products, not just acquire them."
Best Buy is going to start retailing an electric motorcycle sometime this fall, in an effort to repurpose some of the space available in its cavernous stores. I think the bigger opportunity is to use that space to deliver new and different services.
At last month's Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Hiroki Ono of Japan walked away a winner. But he didn't take home a Grand Prix or Golden Lion. Ono, a 23-year-old aspiring filmmaker, placed first for "Feel the Globe."
New formats of existing retail brands seem to be popping up all over the place. Best Buy Mobile bby_mobile was introduced a couple of years ago as a store-within-a-store concept — the company then launched standalone Best Buy Mobiles and recently announced plans to open 40 more this year. Petco just launched Unleashed unleashed(with more personalized service and “hipper attitude” than the original format) and Baskin-Robbins has been testing Cafe BR cafe-br(featuring a make-your-own-sundae bar and higher-end desserts such as fondue) and BR Express (a smaller store focusing on soft-serve ice cream.) These new formats seem to be a great way for retailers to appeal to more shopper need-states.
Best Buy is picking up market share, thanks in part to the demise of rival Circuit City. But the electronics giant also has a formidable competitor in Walmart, which has been revamping its electronics departments and stocking more-sophisticated products. Now Best Buy is battling back with a spot that calls out Walmart by name.
Retailers like OfficeMax are opening scaled-down versions of their stores or inventing outlets entirely to test new concepts without a hefty investment. The stores are a relatively safe bet despite the recession because the space is cheaper and the stores require less inventory, fewer employees and smaller spaces.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is revamping the electronics departments in its more than 3,500 U.S. stores this week, ramping up an aggressive battle with Best Buy Co. and Amazon.com to seize customers up for grabs due to the demise of Circuit City Stores Inc. Wal-Mart's roomier and more interactive electronics displays begin arriving in stores Monday, showcasing the latest mobile phones and portable computers, and including standalone sections for popular brands such as Nintendo Co. and Apple Inc.
Yesterday, I wrote about how I didn't necessarily understand (or believe) Best Buy's plans to expand significantly its private label technology products business, and its hopes that incorporating customer feedback would let it make simple improvements that the big name brands might miss. I think there's a far bigger, far more radical, and much more likely sustainable opportunity for the company to pursue: Services.
Best Buy plans to expand significantly its private label technology products business, believing that customer feedback in its stores will let it make simple improvements that the big name brands might miss. Such vertical integration might be torn right from Capitalism 101, but I'm not sure that I buy it.
Best Buy Co. is rapidly expanding its private-label electronics business in a gamble to gain a key competitive advantage over rivals such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. Best Buy believes it can prosper in private-label electronics -- an area that has historically flummoxed U.S. retailers -- by using the mountains of customer feedback it collects from its stores to make simple innovations to established electronic gadgetry. The move comes as Best Buy's position in the consumer electronics market has strengthened in the past year following the liquidation of former rival Circuit City Stores Inc.
"It's not about stickiness on our website, it's about slipperiness," Bob Kraut, VP-marketing communications at Pizza Hut, said today at Ad Age's Digital Conference in New York when describing the company's approach to digital marketing. "We want people to come in and out as fast as they can because they know what they want and we want to give it to them in the minimum amount of time." Michele Azar, VP-emerging channels at Best Buy, and John Weiss, managing director of Delta.com, joined Mr. Kraut on a panel moderated by Nielsen Online's Pete Blackshaw to discuss the ways in which technology has changed their companies from both an internal and external standpoint.
Best Buy, ConAgra, Dr Pepper Snapple Group earnings drive gains.
Best Buy, Whirlpool, and others sequester workers to live and think together in hopes they'll hatch ideas for the real (corporate) world.
Finally victorious over longtime archrival Circuit City Stores Inc., Best Buy Co. is now gearing up to fight an even more powerful foe: Wal-Mart.
We live in an age where the Internet and the telephone have created enormous scale and opportunity for businesses large and small. For the most part, this has been a good thing, allowing companies to reach, acquire and serve more customers than ever before. While this reach and scale has helped to foster innovation at an unprecedented rate, it has also served to disintermediate companies from their customers.
Best Buy is expanding its recycling program to all U.S. stores next month, and while it will charge $10 for many items, it will also reward customers with a $10 gift card. Experts say the move shows how important it is to link doing the right thing with the immediate impact of cost benefits for consumers.
Video games are now an essential part of American family life. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 65% of American households play console or computer-based video games. And with this increased prevalence are increasing concerns--and possibly disagreements--about what would be a "healthy" amount of gaming for kids.
Low prices trumped panache as big-box stores crowded out department stores in Interbrand Design Forum's first ever survey of the top 50 retail brands.
Music and electronics retailer J&R Music World has launched series of TV spots that use dark humor to remind shoppers of its New York heritage — and make no mention of three-day sales or unbelievable prices on digital cameras.
If you like buying stuff from Best Buy but you can’t stand actually entering the stores, you might soon be able to just sit in your car and wait for them to bring your in-store pickup purchases out to you as though it were a lukewarm bag of Chili’s Chicken Crispers.
Laden with excess inventory, hungry for sales and worried because of five fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, the nation’s retailers went into a price-cutting frenzy long before today.
Ask a dozen advertising agencies for advice on marketing in a downturn and the chances are that each will begin with a lecture on the dangers of cutting budgets. Even for those having to do more with less, however, there are lessons to be learned about how to return stronger.
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