Best Buy

In recent years and under the direction of past CEO, Brad Anderson, Best Buy has seen year over year growth. The issue is the need for maintaining future growth of Best Buy. Is the tried and tested customer-centric model that kept the organization afloat, even during the 2007-08 financial crisis, enough? The problem in this case can be seen when the customer-centric model is placed under the microscope. Best Buy has an effective model to get the right product into the right customer’s hands, that is, provided a customer walks into a store at all. Provided they do, we know their experience is going to be positive. What is the strategy to get customers into the stores? If the focus is an aim to increase traffic in Best Buy’s 1,300-store
If they aim to steer clear of having to install a hospital bed at their headquarters for their own brand, they may need to take an approach that sees “aggression” actually take the back seat. Competitive pacification would fit well here. The independent pacification strategy aims to market the industry as a whole versus tweaking and marketing what Best Buy does well on its own. Thus far, Best Buy has focused on what works well once a customer happens themselves inside a store. Outside of the creation of Geek Squad, a team ready to make all consumer electronics more enjoyable, the retail giant has done little to promote the consumer electronics industry as a whole. This is where the focus has the option of not only being independent, but allows for a shift toward a more cooperative effort as well. Best Buy may be a front-runner in their category, but as previously stated, they are not alone. A cooperative strategy remains untapped. The Insignia branding saw relationships formed with hardware manufacturers in a way that allowed for a specific product to be marketed and sold; a successful strategy, but again, only for customers already walking amongst the aisles. An alternative might see Best Buy teaming with another large retailer that dabbles in electronics with the aim to influence the environment together. A synergistic approach would likely do well to increase consumer awareness of the electronics
Gleaning from Anderson’s success, this tenderfoot would be best situated at having both a well-defined and execution-ready strategy, and also one that builds on the culture that has been previously primed. Specificity, though, in this case, is not so much an orientation that maintains a clutch on each prospective component within the organization, as it is a widened view of purposeful forward movement as an organization.
The future focus of Best Buy should maintain less micro-action and more macro-action. The alternative strategy of competitive pacification would allow the organization to push consumer electronics from afar, ultimately increasing store traffic. The pre-positioned infrastructure (the 1,300-store global chain) would be best suited to aim to increase the number of potential customers versus further tuning an already well-defined customer experience (one that is tried and true). A further option of incorporating an otherwise classified “competitor” in a cooperative light would dub the newfound strategy as a “cooperative