What the New Best Buy Branding Gets Absolutely Correct

It’s been a few weeks now since the largest big box consumer electronics retailer unveiled its first logo refresh in nearly 30 years. The simplified Best Buy logo, which pushes the famed yellow tag down into a subscript afterthought, was just a part of the company’s effort to reshape its image as more than just a place where you can go to buy the latest gadget.

Alongside the modernized logo came the launch of a new TV commercial spot that puts all of the focus on the customer experience. Rather than showing different gadgets or talking about the best deals up for grabs, Best Buy puts the spotlight on the conversations that take place between its blue shirt wearing employees and the many different types of customers that come into their stores.

“Telling the story of our people — and how we make a meaningful impact on customers’ lives — is at the heart of this work,” Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Whit Alexander said in a statement at the time the rebrand was announced. “Our people are our insurmountable advantage.”

I’ve seen those ads pop onto my TV at home A few things stand out about the new spot, all of which prove that the company understands the current state of affairs for not only retail, but the consumer tech market as well.

For starters, the ads, which are shot in black and white—with the exception of the bright blue shirts worn by Best Buy employees—demonstrate customer diversity in the best ways possible. The conversations involve a mom shopping for gifts for her kids, a dad trying to remain relatively hip while talking about the latest video game, an elderly women who’s looking for her tech guru, and a middle aged man trying to deck out his man cave. Each has their own unique conversation with a Blue Shirt employee, bringing to the table different scenarios that any retailer today—consumer tech ones in particular—is likely to face.

But woven into those conversations are subtle hints by the Blue Shirt as to how technology can actually be used in ways to improve the customers’ life. It simplifies the language around tech in a way that makes it easy to understand for the consumer—explaining how an app can get one’s oven to start warming up so it’s ready to start cooking as soon as you walk in the door, for example.

And digging deeper, the ads show the power of conversing with the customer. The shopping experience is one that should be tailored to their needs, and that comes through ever so clearly in the Best Buy spots. The employees ask questions to engage the shopper, to get to know what problem it is they’re trying to address. They connect with the customer in some way. Then they offer their expertise and end with a recommendation. The product, in each case, is really seen as the end result of that interaction. It’s the payoff at the end of an engaging, personalized in-store experience.

That message is one that can trickle down to consumer tech retailers of any size. Of course the customer is in your store for a reason—be it to browse, dream about their next big purchase, or to actually shop. The goal is to complete a sale and have that customer leave with a receipt in hand. But how you get there isn’t by pushing product or promotions at them the second the walk in the door. Sure, products are part of the equation, but they should reside to the right of the equal sign. It’s the conversations you have with the customer that lead to the results you’re looking for. How well can you and your team get to know the customer, the situation they’re facing, what it is they are trying to accomplish? And then what’s technology’s role in helping them reach their end goal?

They may be just a few witty 30- and 60-second spots that are part of a larger rebranding effort, but those Best Buy ads should speak volumes to every consumer tech retailer out there.