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Case Study: Best Buy

Marketing Strategy of Best Buy

Marketing strategy is an essential component for the company success as it provides the right
products, for the right people at the right prices. Therefore for any company, an effective
marketing strategy will be required to be implemented. For brands like Best Buy, their presence
of physical stores had more advantages for them. The availability of the stores at the domestic
levels within the wide range helps the company to attract more customers with the ease of
access. It had a strong web-based presence, which turns the visitors to the potential customers.
And the last is the trusted brand name.

Ecommerce has changed the way retailing work in the market particularly after amazon which
made the customer centric strategy and created a great influence on the market (Wamba et al.,
2008). In such condition, the physical stores required to make their strategies more aggressive.
The same happened with the Best Buy which had to make sure that the customers are able to
find them whenever and wherever they required.

This creates a stronger brand value for the customers as the customers are able to rely on the
store for their needs and wants. Best Buy was able to understand the importance of availability
to the customers and therefore were able to create a more effective strategy in the form of
enhanced number of physical stores around the region. Physical stores are crucial in some cases
where the engagement of the customers are supposed to be in the form of the physical touch
(Poncin & Mimoun, 2014). Therefore despite the increased influence of the ecommerce, Best
Buy was able to retain itself in the market.

The presence of the strong website of the retail stores is also an effective strategy. With the help
of integrated online and physical presence the store was able to create a strong presence for the
customers. As the studies show that the stores which are able to increase their physical and
online presence at the same time, are able to manage the customers (Heinze & Hu, 2006). The
visibility of the store increase as the customers are able to check the products on the website and
then purchase it from the stores. Moreover the customer engagement increases and the
competitive advantage is provided to the company. Therefore effective web based presence was
also efficient market strategy.

The web-based presence included making the purchase process seamless and effortless.
Therefore the company reduced the number of clicks from 8 to 3 so that the customers are able
make quicker purchase without spending a lot of time on a single purchase. Offering of the
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product recommendation and “store pickup” adds to their experience at the website therefore
increasing the engagement.

The strategy also included the matching policy, which helped the customers to compare the
prices from Best Buy to the other online stores. This particular strategy was effective for the
customers who wanted to compare their experience at the store to their competitors. And
availability of the comparison increased the transparency as well.

Development of New Strategy

Customer experience map helps the company or the business to understand how the purchase of
the product will flow in a certain direction from the first step of consideration to making
decisions. The following strategy will help to enhance the customer experience at the store and
therefore develop a stronger customer experience map.

The first focus of the store is to increase the innovation level in the store. The retail innovation is
mostly dependent on the technological advancement in the stores. This helps to decrease the
manual labor and therefore the efficiency in the operations increases. The innovation in the
operations that Best Buy should implement includes the:

Inventory management technologies:

Inventory management is very important as it will make sure that the customer is getting what
they need and there are no excess products left at the stores that would increase the inventory
storage at the warehouses. Therefore technological based inventory management will be
effective tool to increases the customer experience. In this regard the use of software with auto-
replenishment feature is very effective. It helps the store to keep a count of the products and
when detects the lower number of the specific products, it orders them automatically (Aro-
Gordan & Gupte, 2016). The store should make sure that the order is first checked by the
inventory manager so that irrelevant and unnecessary products are not ordered. Real time
analytical dashboards are also effective. These help to calculate the data and bring the final
result which should decrease the manual process of these operations decreasing the threat of the
error (Aro-Gordan & Gupte, 2016). Digital marketing is also important as the store should
increase its digital media presence through the use of Facebook, Instagram and other social
media sites. These sites help the company to engage more and more customers particularly the
younger customers who are the major users of these sites.

Long-term relationship with the customers:

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Turning a visitor to the potential customer, and then converting that potential customer to the
loyal purchaser is very critical yet important task for the retail stores. Therefore Best Buy should
make sure that the customer experience is turning the customers into the loyal customers. There
are many methods to do so:

Engagement of the customers:

Engagement of the customers is very important for not only the first time purchaser but also for
the returning customers. These long-term customers are not just the purchasers of the products
but they are responsible for many other operations as well (Woo et al., 2019). Such as they
create the word of mouth effect for the store and bring more customers with them. Therefore
their engagement is very important.

Making them experience the brand:

Customer only remember the experience that they had with the store and the products.
Therefore store should focus on allowing the customers with an opportunity to experience the
store (Woo et al., 2019). The employees and teams should meet the customers with every
possible opportunities, despite the mode of this meeting. They should be remembered when
they arrive at the store and should be sent with constant offers related mails. Asking for their
feedback is also very important for the store.

Exploring their social media presence:

As presented before, social media platforms are the effective tool for the customer engagement.
And particularly in this time, when the social media presence of each person varies, the word
coming out from the customers are not same and their influence are also not the same. There
are some customers which have more following on these platforms and others have their
inactive accounts (Woo et al., 2019). The long term relationships should be created with the
customers who have stronger social media presence as this will help the store to attract more
customers and engagement with them will pay off to the company.

Providing value:

The money customer spend on the product is very important to them and therefore they want a
higher value out of it. When the stores are able to make their products of equal or higher value of
the money that is being spent on it, the customers’ engagement and long-term relationship is
created (Ranaweera, 2007). Increasing their experience at the store and helping them to choose
the best product are some ways to increase the value of their purchase.
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The customer experience map for Best Buy based on these strategies is presented below:

need
stores social media tv website word of mouth

consideration
browsing at store website and social media surfing talking to existing customers

purchase decision
pickup online purchase and delivery in store purchase

after purchase services

technical support return policy installation

increasing loyalty
promotional messages and emails discount for returning customer

Memorable Omni channel Experience

Omni channel experience refers to the experience from different channels which helps the
company or the stores to have a seamless experienced for the customers. These channels
include, online and physical stores, and telephone sales for the retail industry. There are several
evidence present in this regard which show that the customer start their experience from the
online stores and would end their journey at the physical purchase in the retail stores. Therefore
Best Buy needs to create a stronger Omni channel strategy that would help them to attract more
and more customers.

Retail researchers have presented several strategies to make the Omni channel experience
memorable for the customers:

Creating a seamless experience at cellphones:

Most of the younger customers are always on their phone when they need to purchase
something. They do their research and visit the stores. Their preference include online, mobile
and in store purchase and therefore they require their mobile experience to be effortless (Akter
et al., 2019). This requires Best Buy to make sure that either through app or direct access to the
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store, the customers are able to enjoy a seamless visit to the stores. The site should be mobile –
friendly and the visuals should be attractive.

User data management:

Since online shopping include a lot of consumer personal data and their purchase history along
with payment details. This create a huge responsibility for the company to manage their data
effectively (Chopra, 2016). This management includes ensuring the safety of the data and
protecting them from any breach. Moreover the previous data should be helpful to make their
future experience more memorable.

Engagement with all channels:

All the channels of Omni channel marketing should be managed and handled effectively so that
the customers will engage them all. This will bring benefit from the money that has been spent
on these channels and will attract more customers (Chopra, 2016).

All of these strategies will help the store to make the customers experience with the Omni
channels of the stores more valuable and memorable.

Evaluation of the Kellogg’s Student Proposal

In store experience:

This proposal from the students is very effective as to compete with the giants like Amazon,
store should make sure that their stores are providing best experiences to the customers so that
they won’t go to the online stores like Amazon. Geek Squads, sales executives and physical
showrooms will help to make customers more engaged with the store.

Enhancing ownership:

This is also a very effective way to increase the loyalty. When the customers are provided with
the filling experience they are more likely to purchase again. Though it would be costly to
implement however it will bring future benefits to compensate for the cost.

Rent to own:

This strategy is particularly effective for the younger customers who want to experience newer
products without spending a lot of money. Renting these gadgets will help them to understand
how the money spent on it will bring value to their money. In this way, the stores will be able to
turn them into potential and then loyal customers.
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References:

Akter, S., Hossain, M. I., Lu, S., Aditya, S., Hossain, T. M. T., & Kattiyapornpong, U. (2019).
Does service quality perception in omnichannel retailing matter? A systematic review
and agenda for future research. Exploring omnichannel retailing, 71-97.

Aro-Gordon, S., & Gupte, J. (2016). Review of modern inventory management

techniques. Global Journal of Business & Management, 1(2), 1-22.

Chopra, S. (2016). How omni-channel can be the future of retailing. Decision, 43(2), 135-144.

Heinze, N., & Hu, Q. (2006). The evolution of corporate web presence: A longitudinal study of
large American companies. International journal of information management, 26(4),
313-325.

Poncin, I., & Mimoun, M. S. B. (2014). The impact of “e-atmospherics” on physical

stores. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 21(5), 851-859.

Ranaweera, C. (2007). Are satisfied long-term customers more profitable? Evidence from the
telecommunication sector. Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for
Marketing, 15(2), 113-120.

Wamba, S. F., Lefebvre, L. A., Bendavid, Y., & Lefebvre, É. (2008). Exploring the impact of
RFID technology and the EPC network on mobile B2B eCommerce: A case study in the
retail industry. International Journal of Production Economics, 112(2), 614-629.

Woo, H., Kim, K. H., Kim, S. J., & Wang, H. (2019). Service innovations’ roles in long-term
relationships with business customers. Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing
Science, 29(4), 457-469.