Interesting information point to add: Chumby designed a product for Best Buy (the Insignia Infocast). Not sure how successful it was, but I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of details that we are not privy to.
Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#12I thought this post was absolutely brilliant. It's completely outside of Best Buy's current corporate culture, but perhaps they understand that experimentation is greatly needed. I envision a specific, labeled section within Best Buy stores that is titled something along the lines of, "Best Buy Labs". It would contain non-UPC products of quality and would attract attention almost purely out of consumer curiousity. ("…
An interesting idea. If it's viable at all, though, shouldn't it be viable independently of whether a big-box chain does it?
It almost sounds like you're describing what Radio Shack should have been.
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#13Interesting information point to add: Chumby designed a product for Best Buy (the Insignia Infocast). Not sure how successful it was, but I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of details that we are not privy to.
Chumby is an interesting case, and a sad one. I think Chumby has a lot in common with much larger companies such as Nintendo, RIM, and HP, in that their business model was demolished by the iOS steamroller that they didn't see coming.
Unlike those other companies, Chumby didn't have the cash or the product-line diversity to put up any kind of a fight. If they had survived, they'd eventually find themselves running Android on commodity hardware, just like everyone else at the low end of the market for consumer gadgets is eventually going to have to.
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#14Best Buy has its own house brands like Dynex and Rocketfish so they have some experience working with outsourced product development but I think there's a bigger opportunity to transform the Best Buy experience. The biggest strengths of BB is that they're a well known brand with supplier connections with every major CE company in the business along with a large network of stores which in many cases are positioned in very good areas with high visibility and good accessibility. On the downside, they have a reputation for having poor customer service and the appearance of having incompetent workers turns a lot of high value customers off. Here's what I would do if I were Best Buy:
1) Trim the workforce and focus on service - Your biggest asset is that when anything goes wrong, just come back into Best Buy and you'll take care of it. This is not easy for online channels to replicate especially when shipping costs continue to rise and it's a hassle to box and ship a 60" LCD TV back.
2) Move away from a SKU focused experience - Given most of Best Buy's customers are probably in the middle-America, slightly older, demographic, I'm surprised that they just put things on shelves and expect people to know how to pick/find the right item. This forces people to rely on the Blue Shirts which in many cases results in a negative experience (see Louis CK show about Blue Shirts). Instead, I would transform the store into an Ikea showroom like experience where people SEE, EXPERIENCE, PLAY with all of the technology and see how it's applied in real life. This would also reduce the number of salespeople you need milling around.
3) Reduce SKUs - BB is never going to have as many SKUs as Amazon so I would focus on carrying a more curated set of products at a few logical price points. This could lead to easier support and help the Blue Shirts develop more expertise since they don't have to know hundreds of products.
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#15I thought this post was absolutely brilliant. It's completely outside of Best Buy's current corporate culture, but perhaps they understand that experimentation is greatly needed. I envision a specific, labeled section within Best Buy stores that is titled something along the lines of, "Best Buy Labs". It would contain non-UPC products of quality and would attract attention almost purely out of consumer curiousity. ("…
An interesting idea. If it's viable at all, though, shouldn't it be viable independently of whether a big-box chain does it? It almost sounds like you're describing what Radio Shack should have been.
Key in my mind is a large number of casual walk-bys of people with no hobbyist interest in electronics. That would be Best Buy's competitive advantage in this space.
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#16Not exactly my field, but my understanding is that large retailers sometimes do do outsourced product development roughly similar to this post's suggestion. Typically, that is a result of someone in direct sales building a monstrously successful product (relative to other direct sales items), then using that as leverage to get the chain to stock it on terms which are more favorable than their usual ones. (Consumer el…
This.
Too many people confuse distribution and product development.
While I laud the OPs suggestion that retailers like Best Buy might be more competitive if they could source products that Amazon cannot, there is an existence proof for this called "Pier 1 Imports" whose "special sauce" consisted almost entirely with seeking out niche suppliers, locking up a retail relationship with them, and putting their stuff into stores. Great for craft kinds of things but not so much consumer electronics.
Now if you want to go so far as to say there is an emergent market for 'craft' electronics (and there is some evidence on Kickstart to suggest this looking that the Blink project for example) then perhaps what should really be the point is to create the 'Pier 1' of those electronics. The seeds of that would seem to be in Makershed.
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#17Interesting information point to add: Chumby designed a product for Best Buy (the Insignia Infocast). Not sure how successful it was, but I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of details that we are not privy to.
The Infocast was a nice little product. I have one sitting next to me right now. It was not, however, a big sales success. I bought mine on closeout in late 2010.
Part of the problem was that Best Buy didn't know where to put the thing, nor how to market it. The 3.5" model was sitting next to the alarm clocks. The larger 8" model was sitting next to the Sony Dash in the picture frame area. You can figure out the rest from there.
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#18They are trying: https://www.facebook.com/bestbuy/app_212967045493154?071612
And failing miserably, just look at the ideas that qualified for top 10 and the the other 61 that were not picked... seriously? a iPod Shuffle attached to a shoe?
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#19This post seems to assume that Best Buy is in the business
of selling consumer electronics but they're not. They're in the business
of selling services that are attached to consumer electronics.
I'd wager that Best Buy makes at least an order of magnitude more profit removing spyware for $180 then they do selling a $500 laptop. Not everybody buys those services, though, so they need high volume items to sell to support that revenue.
The $359 appliance to "cook meats and vegetables in airtight plastic bags in a water bath" is a perfect example of something that gives internet retailers a huge advantage - being able to find the people before distributing the item. But trying to plug that into Best Buy's business model would kill the thing that actually earns them a profit.
Re: Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
#20Best Buy has its own house brands like Dynex and Rocketfish so they have some experience working with outsourced product development but I think there's a bigger opportunity to transform the Best Buy experience. The biggest strengths of BB is that they're a well known brand with supplier connections with every major CE company in the business along with a large network of stores which in many cases are positioned in…
That's right along the lines of a possibility I've considered for BBY myself.
It would be amusing to see BBY become a champion of customer service with a curated selection as I feel like they were a major force in promoting price and selection over service in the first place.
>Your biggest asset is that when anything goes wrong, just come back into Best Buy and you'll take care of it.
One of the things that permanently soured me on BBY several years ago was seeing an elderly woman about to break into tears arguing with a manager over the "service plan" for her TV. The manager was explaining that she wasn't entitled to a replacement unless BBY spent longer than 45 days trying to fix the one she purchased. Apparently, it had only been 42 days at the time of the argument.