I love Best Buy.
There, I said it. And I’m proud.
When I say Best Buy, I mean their bricks and mortar stores, not their online shopping site. I have nothing against BestBuy.com, but my point here is about shopping in Best Buy stores.
It would be easy to see Best Buy as a dominant player on the high street, and with the demise of Circuit City and CompUSA, almost a monopoly. But of course that’s very far from the truth – Best Buy are under attack from all sides; online by everyone from Amazon to TigerDirect to Buy.com to umpteen other retailers with generally wider ranges of products at lower prices than Best Buy stores; and offline from Staples, Walmart, Costco, Target and every other discount barn with space to stack TVs and laptops up to the ceiling and flog them cheap. Best Buy cannot be complacent for a second, they are in a cut-throat business.
So what have Best Buy got to offer to keep themselves alive?
It’s the experience. Best Buy make walking into their stores, for someone like me who loves anything with a power cord, an enjoyable experience. I’ll need to get hold of a stack of CD-R discs and instead of ordering online I’ll make the detour on the way home to Best Buy, and spend thirty minutes browsing plasma TVs, cameras, laptops and all manner of things I don’t need. I just like being in the store. I can’t say the same about Costco. You go to Costco to buy as much as you can get in the back of your car in bulk, as cheap as possible, as fast as possible, and get the heck out of there. I’ve got nothing against Costco either, it’s perfect when you need to save money, but I don’t think anyone goes there to browse the shelves.
And of course, browsing online doesn’t provide the physical shopping experience – you can’t see the real product, pick it up, press its buttons, watch it in action. Perhaps most importantly, you can’t buy it there and then and take it home with you. If I am in any way typical, it is amazing how much money is spent on big-ticket items on impulse. Sure, I’ll do some research online, but if I have it in mind that I need a TV, I want to go and buy it today, and plug it in that night. Even waiting 24 hours is enough to make me forget the idea. Sales people know this – get the customer in front of the product, make them fall in love with it, and they’ll have to have it, now.
The downfall of Circuit City and CompUSA is easily blamed on the rise of internet shopping, but it didn’t have to seal their fate. In the old days there was no alternative – you had to buy from an actual store and there was a big enough market to support the weaker stores. But come the internet, and neither of those stores provided any benefit to shopping in their stores as opposed to online. In my local store Circuit City failed to display prices for most of their products – a hideous error – and staffed the place with disgruntled kids who barely knew where the on switch was. CompUSA’s store in downtown San Francisco used to frisk its customers on their way out. OK, they didn’t actually frisk them – their security guards made them open their bags to prove they hadn’t stolen anything – but all the same, it made the reward for going into their premises being made to feel like a criminal on the way out. That’s not what I’m looking for in a shopping experience.
Best Buy on the other hand know you have a choice. They can’t compete on price with online discount sites, or offline with pile-’em-high warehouses, and they can’t keep the whole range of kit in stock on site like specialist retailers such as TigerDirect. But they can make the experience something you will love, and that is critical to their success.
When you walk into a Best Buy the store itself is clean, brightly lit, well laid out and with dozens of big screen TVs, laptops, shiny fridges and washing machines, cameras and iPods on display – quality kit that is nice just to look at.
At my local Best Buy in San Rafael, the staff at the door always without fail greet every customer with a friendly ‘welcome to Best Buy’. I don’t care if it’s a bit insincere, they make the effort; it’s about me as a customer enjoying their store. It is mildly irksome to have to say ‘No thanks, I’m just browsing.’ to half a dozen different staff as you walk between departments, but that is much better than being ignored and not finding well-informed help when you want it. (Note to Best Buy: Offer people the choice of a label they can stick on their coat with ‘No Thanks, Just Browsing’ written on it).
In our own world of Public Relations Consultancy, is there anything to learn from all this? In my view, there is a mission-critical lesson for us here. I keep going back to Best Buy and buying things there even though it’s out of my way, their prices aren’t the lowest, and they often don’t have exactly what I want in their store, because I enjoy it.
Over the years I have seen clients make agency decisions for similar reasons. When we have strong, close relationships with our clients, that both us and they enjoy, then the inevitable speed bumps along the road can be overcome. These are the client relationships which stand the test of time. Conversely, if relationships aren’t so strong and the client isn’t feeling the love, when hitches crop up (as they are bound to do in any long term working relationship), it can be the trigger for a re-pitch, instead of being something both sides want to work through and resolve together.
I’m not saying Bite or any other agency can get away with mediocre work just by lunching the CMO every week, a poor product will and should always get you fired. If Best Buy sold kit that fell apart when you got home, I wouldn’t go there no matter how nice the store was (I’m looking at you, Radio Shack … ).
The point boils down to this; clients are human beings too, and they want to enjoy working with us. If they do, it’s something they’ll want to keep doing. If they don’t, it’s something they’ll want to stop doing, even if we are on an objective basis doing a great job. It’s also likely that a relationship which everyone enjoys will produce better results than one that feels like hard work.
One of Bite’s core values is ‘Fun.’ It’s a bit of a controversial word as to some it seems frivolous, and perhaps another word we could use would be ‘Enjoy.’ We have always focused on making working at Bite something our people enjoy, and working with Bite something our clients enjoy. Because if we don’t, we can be fairly sure they won’t be clients for too much longer (isn’t that right, Circuit City?)