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
"When we first started, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing and learned from each other."
Meredith Black Elyse HornbacherBuilding Community and Common Trends to Look for in 2021
December 17, 2020
"Values conversation is less threatening when framed as wanting to understand why we're doing this project or why we're here."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022
"In government, the org chart really matters – it influences who talks to whom and who gets to interface."
Michael LandEstablishing Design Operations in Government
February 18, 2021
"Risk doesn’t usually happen out of the blue; there are driving forces you can watch for."
Bassel Deeb Will OsbornDo More With Less: Equip and Lead Design Orgs Through Adversity
October 2, 2023
"Although you can't force culture, you can design for it."
Tanya SnookDesigning the team experience: Building culture through onboarding
November 4, 2021
"I felt this was a slippery slope—the blurring of lines between roles and responsibilities."
Allan LowsonRehashing the Double Diamond: Collaborating across functions with AI-assisted prototyping
June 9, 2026
"We don’t put users in a position to make sustainability trade-offs; the design must do the heavy lifting upstream."
James ChudleyDecarbonising User Journeys: How minimising enables us to do more with less
February 19, 2025
"It became less important to keep doing fresh research and more important to grow the collective team knowledge."
Scott Jensen Sarah Delaney Carmen LiuShort Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
December 6, 2022
"Global mindset training includes simple things like teaching when to use email versus Slack given time zone differences."
Brennan HartichCommunicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
November 7, 2018
