According to a recent column in 1to1 Media, Best Buy -- the U.S. consumer electronics retailer -- is applying target marketing principles to engage distinct segments in the marketplace. I like the company's leadership attitude because they're not afraid to experiment, even when it means that they are one of the few in their space that will try a new approach to connecting with consumers.
Best Buy first re-examined the way it communicates with customers from a strategic point of view. Marketing messages rarely took into consideration what customers wanted to hear about, so the marketing team decided in the first phase to start thinking intelligently about communicating more relevant messages. "We don't use the megaphone as much," Mayberry says. "We learned that we can't scream at everybody with the same message." In the second phase the teams started to listen to customers through surveys; in the third phase Best Buy customized the messaging.
Strategy is important but not functional unless it's paired with execution elements. Mayberry's group created a team that would strictly execute the campaigns. This new team has extensive database and analytics expertise. The teams, still organized around specific customer groups, now solely produce marketing strategies and ideas. Also in place is a new cross-functional team that decides how to build ideas into communication streams so that the messaging is integrated across channels, but not conflicting to customers.
With the new organizational structure in place, Best Buy needed a single platform to automate, centralize, customize, and analyze its marketing campaigns. More important, the technology had to connect to and access all the company's data sources. Working with Unica, Best Buy's segment teams can now create rules-based trigger campaigns in predefined templates to allow for customized messaging; they can assign a variety of unique offers to specific segments, and then track the performance for each one.