Best Buy Goes After Women (again)
The female market remains elusive to electronics giant Best Buy. Even after the “Jill initiative” in 2006, which featured friendlier store environments and personal sales assistants trained to determine how technology fits into your lifestyle, competitors like Wal-Mart and Amazon have cornered the women’s electronics market.
So, why does Best Buy, a brand that traditionally goes after the young, tech-savvy male, care so much? It’s all in the numbers. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, women are outspending men in electronics purchases. In the U.S. women spent $55 billion compared to the $41 billion of men. The trade organization also reports that women influence 90 percent of consumer electronics purchases.
Best Buy’s stats look a little different. They estimated earlier this year that they commanded roughly 22% of U.S. consumer electronics sales, its share of sales to women was just 16%. Obviously, they’re missing out. And, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, that has top execs at the company concerned.
So, this time, Best Buy is tapping it’s female workers and customers with their “Women’s Leadership Forums” groups. So far the output of these groups have included things like appliance showrooms and a program that allowed loyalty points to be donated to local schools.
Will it work? I hope so. I’d love to see a large electronics retailer finally get it right when it comes to marketing to women. However, the repeat effort and the main reason for looking to the female market (losing to the competition), causes me to suspect that C-suite support at Best Buy is not quite there. In our experience, that means the effort will most likely fall short. Take note marketers. If you want your brand to capture a strong following from women, you need support from the top down. Find a champion (a male if possible) at the executive level that really believes in this stuff and the road to success will be a bit easier to come by.