Chapter 14 Marketing Channels and Retailing

Over the weekend I visited the Best Buy in my neighborhood. The store was in a shopping mall and surrounded by other retailers. The first thing I noticed was the sign on the store. It was illuminated in bright yellow. Best Buy is a retail chain that specializes in electronics. Recently the company's CEO Hubert Joly said that Best Buy is now an online retailer first, but the brick and mortar stores are still important. Best Buy has been seeing a steady double digit increases in its online sales, but a steady decrease in the brick and mortar store sales. Joly said that they wanted to be the go to electronics retailer for the millennial generation the same way they had been for the baby boomers.

When I entered the store I was surprised by how many different sections there were.
For example the audio section was broken up into different subsections, categorizing each so that products would be easier to find. There were also sections for items from a specific manufacture like Beats By Dre, Apple and Samsung. The portable audio subsection was then broken down further to two categories, small form factor speakers and headphones. And even to the headphone section had signs on the shelves showing where the over ear, on ear, in ear and mobile device compatible headphones were. Best Buy did a very good job figuring out the layout of the store. It helped customers find exactly where the products they were looking for would be. What was not good was the fact that they were out of stock on the headphone I wanted and as I looked around the show case I saw that they were out of stock on a lot of the items that were listed. This might have something to do with the fact that half of Best Buy's in store sales are ordered by customers online and shipped to that specific store for pick up. 


Best Buy has recently started to develop a new data mining software called Athena that will give you suggestions based on what your browser history shows you have been searching for. They also switched out their search engine on the website to one that offers better results for customer searches. If you follow the money, it is clear where Best Buy is focusing their efforts. But the pivot to online retailing might be hurting the quality of shopping at the physical location. As a customer I didn't feel that the service was what it should be. Not once was I approached an asked if I needed help. When I asked a sales associated about the out of stock product I was directed to a computer where I could order it from the website and ship it to my house or the store.