Not Your Ordinary Re-Brand: Design's Path to Driving Customer Obsession at Best Buy
Summary
In 2018, Best Buy re-branded. The impact of this otherwise ordinary corporate event went far beyond getting a spiffy new logo and a custom font. This talk will tell the story of how our effort to re-brand kicked off a profound cultural transformation at the company. It will cover: How rolling out the brand led to the creation of a CX vision that helped make it real for each of our 125,000 employees How this catalyzed the need to centralize our experience design organizations into a unified force How the company continues to use the guiding behaviors created in the rebrand to enable experiences our customers and employees will love
Key Insights
-
•
Best Buy repositioned from being transactional to a relationship-driven company with the mantra of being an inspiring friend to customers.
-
•
Customer obsession was chosen deliberately to provoke dialogue and set a high bar for continuous improvement.
-
•
Employee experience is critical to delivering great customer experience—they cannot be separated.
-
•
Best Buy’s guiding behaviors—Be Human, Make It Real, Think About Tomorrow—translate brand values into actionable employee behaviors.
-
•
Cultural transformation is a long-term process, typically taking around five years, requiring daily practice and patience.
-
•
Leaders play a pivotal role in setting vision and modeling customer obsession for the entire organization.
-
•
Measuring progress relies on both leading indicators (behavior adoption) and lagging indicators (customer satisfaction scores).
-
•
Change fatigue is a real challenge; strategic communication must consider audience capacity and timing.
-
•
COVID-19 forced empathetic, human-first decisions, such as pausing in-home services to ensure safety.
-
•
Best Buy emphasizes anticipating customer needs rather than just reacting to pain points or selling products.
Notable Quotes
"We’re no longer in the business of selling computers and TVs. We are in the happiness business."
"We want to be an inspiring friend you go to for advice, not just someone who tells you what to buy."
"Being human is the foundation—seeing the person on the other side of the conversation as a human being."
"The word obsessed is provocative and meant to push us to continually ask what can we do more."
"You have to empower your employees before you can pass on care to your customers."
"We don’t use yesterday’s retail playbook to solve problems for today — that’s impossible."
"People don’t believe their way into new actions; they act their way into new beliefs."
"We have to slow down to speed up — understanding the why before chasing the outcome."
"Excessive messaging leads to change fatigue, especially during times like a pandemic."
"Our purpose is to enrich people’s lives with technology, focusing on how to use—not just what to buy."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"I literally ask, how are you feeling right now? It’s about connecting on a human level before diving into data."
Jerome “Axle” BrownHow to Use Self-Directed Learning to Ensure Your Research Insights are Heard and Acted Upon
March 11, 2021
"We had an engineering culture that confused uniformity with design, and consistency with design."
Phil GilbertA Consistent Culture of Design
May 14, 2015
"High-quality participants are the fuel that makes the whole research operation engine run smoothly."
Kate Towsey Basel Fakhoury Oren Friedman Graham GardnerParticipant Recruitment and Management Tools
March 12, 2026
"We consider machine learning as the third leg of mixed methods research, alongside data science and user research."
Sohit KarolDesigning Delightful Listening Experiences: Mixed Methods Research in the Age of Machine Learning
March 31, 2020
"Developers were hungry for the bigger picture, but the only information available to them was a set of user stories."
Christopher Taylor Edwards Valerie RoskeDesign as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration
September 30, 2021
"Today's problems come from yesterday's solutions."
Sheryl CababaExpanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
February 23, 2023
"Team members told me they felt really seen for the first time during these discussions."
Francesca Barrientos, PhDYou Need Your Own Definition of Design Maturity
June 8, 2022
"It’s important to create space outside work for people to connect to meaningful activities and communities."
Allison SandersOperating with Purpose
January 8, 2024
"It’s not about the diagram, it’s about the dialogue."
Saara Kamppari-Miller"Prototype" vs "Prototype"--Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do
October 24, 2019
