Best Buy’s got its work cut out for it. Recently it reported a 30% drop in quarterly profit, and its stock took a hit when it announced that its sales had dropped for five consecutive quarters.
It’s up against competition from online retailers like Amazon, and that leaves it struggling to find a reason to be. It has reacted by closing underperforming stores and setting up smaller stores called Best Buy Mobile. Salvation could come in tablets and smartphones.
What it is not walking away from is its brand message of good customer service, something that retains a role even in an era of online shopping.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work on trying to get really clear about why we exist,” CMO Barry Judge told me in a recent interview, adding, “technology is a phenomenal business to be in.”
But he said that the 44-year-old retailer needs to “constantly evolve,” as why and how people want to buy evolves. Past differentiators, he said, were price and assortment; now given competition from Walmart and Amazon, the differentiator they’re focused on is the experiences people want to have with technology; Best Buy enables that, he said, though a physical retail environment that augments mobile buying, and vice versa.
