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
"You can’t know a human honestly from the outside alone; you have to let their reality work on you."
Daniel GloydDesigning From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research
February 12, 2026
"Without good relationships, you won’t get good data. And without good data, you won’t have good project outcomes."
Deirdre Hirschtritt Cesar Paredes Marie PerrotResearch is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build
November 17, 2022
"The model was the work of everybody, it was not just my job."
Benjamin RealMaturity Models: A Core Tool for Creating a DesignOps Strategy
October 1, 2021
"Not all climate jobs have digital outputs, so don’t waste your time chasing digital roles in fields like green concrete."
Max Gadney Andrea Petrucci Joshua Stehr Hannah WickesAssessing UX jobs for impact in climate
August 14, 2024
"Sherbiney built a well-functioning agile train in one of the oldest organizations."
Lada GorlenkoTheme 1: Intro
January 8, 2024
"C-FRE stands for curiosity, freedom, reframing, exploration, and engagement—the soft qualities we tend to overlook in play."
Feyikemi AkinwolemiwaPlay to innovate: How curiosity and experimentation transform UX
March 11, 2026
"We are on our third and final day of Advancing Research 2023."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
March 29, 2023
"Synthetic duplicates living on after data deletion raise ethical questions about users’ right to be forgotten."
Llewyn Paine[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
June 5, 2024
"OKRs help highlight intentions to leadership and open up conversations that generate alignment and support."
Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie GoldthorpeOKRs—Helpful or Harmful?
January 20, 2022
