Best Buy CMO Jennie Weber Says Customers Want Inspiration, Not Information

As Best Buy looks to turn its sales around, the electronics retailer is rethinking its relationship to its customers as shoppers’ expectations have evolved, prioritizing providing inspiration over product education.

The retailer announced Tuesday (July 23) a range of branding and user experience changes. This includes a shift in focus, with the company observing that consumers are now educating themselves more about products, so they do not always want information from store associates. Instead, they are more interested in turning to retailers for discovery.

“We’re embracing this change, and we’re excited about it, because we know it’s where our customers want us to go,” Best Buy CMO Jennie Weber said in a statement. “This new world of discovery is personal to every customer, their passions and the moments in life that matter most. They want technology to level up their lives — to help them do more of what they love — and there’s no one more passionate and better positioned to do that than Best Buy.”

The move comes as the company looks to return to sales growth, having seen year-over-year declines every quarter since Q4 fiscal 2022. Most recently, for the first quarter of 2024, comparable sales dropped 6.1% year over year.

The company has updated its color palette, made its tagline “imagine that” and added a hologram spokesperson named Gram.

Lights, Camera, Action

The company noted an increased interest among consumers in viewing videos when researching technology, prompting the company to prioritize creating content for platforms such as YouTube. Best Buy plans to post more than 500 videos to its YouTube channel, its app and its website by the year’s end, a over-threefold increase from last year.

Additionally, the retailer is also adding a “Shop with Videos” capability to its app, which includes “personalized video content.”

Certainly, consumers are looking to more kinds of media for shopping inspiration. The 2023 PYMNTS Intelligence report “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Monetizing Social Media,” which drew on insights from a study of nearly 3,000 U.S. consumers, found that 43% of consumers browse social media to find goods and services. That share rises to 68% for Gen Z and 64% for millennials.

Getting Personal

Best Buy is also heightening its focus on personalization, aligning with the evolving needs of its tech-savvy customers. The retailer’s app, for instance, has been upgraded to offer a more personalized shopping journey, with a new home page tailored to the user and with individualized alerts for sales and exclusive member deals.

“This new era of discovery is coming to life across Best Buy in highly personalized ways for each customer,” the company stated.

Indeed, personalization is key to meeting the needs of today’s shoppers, especially those with cash to burn. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Personalized Offers Are Powerful — But Too Often Off-Base” found that 83% of consumers are interested in receiving personalized offers. This type of messaging is particularly effective with millennials and with those who make more than $100,000 a year, with that share rising to 89% for both groups.