Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Best Buy is increasingly embracing technology to improve its customer experience, and now it has unveiled a new holographic mascot and rebrand.
The electronics retailer said customers are looking to the company to “play a bigger role in helping them discover new technology,” and its new tagline, “Imagine that,” is designed to reflect that change in approach.
“We’re embracing this change, and we’re excited about it, because we know it’s where our customers want us to go,” Jennie Weber, Best Buy’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “They want technology to level up their lives—to help them do more of what they love—and there’s no one more passionate and better positioned to do that than Best Buy.”
As part of the change, the retailer’s new mascot, Gram, will start appearing in advertisements and is already popping up in some back-to-school marketing.
In addition to the new mascot and tagline, the company is giving its brand “a modern look and feel,” which it plans to roll out in phases. This includes a new color palette that adds magenta, teal, and red to its familiar yellow and blue.
Technology first: The rebrand follows a series of investments in technologies designed to better serve customers, including a generative AI-powered customer assistant Best Buy announced in April, around the same time it laid off numerous Geek Squad employees.
The Best Buy app also now includes a new, personalized home page with a “Discover” tab featuring new tech, and a new payments and rewards system.
The brand is also leaning into what it sees as a growing preference for video content among customers, with plans to roll out 500+ videos on the Best YouTube channel by the end of the year.