Retail Management 12th Edition by Barry Berman ,Joel Evans

Exercise 23

Case 3: Best Buy: Promoting Its Insignia Consumer Electronics Brand
As the manager of Best Buy's (www.bestbuy.com) in-store network, Paul Flanigan has the responsibility of developing and implementing a strategy that increases both brand awareness and sales for Insignia, Best Buy's flagship private label. (Best Buy also has Dynex, a second-tier private brand). A specific objective for Best Buy's promotional efforts is to make its Insignia brand a direct competitor to such popular brands as Sony, LG, and Samsung.
Best Buy wants the advertising approach to the Insignia brand to focus on how consumers use this brand, not on the brand itself. Thus, Best Buy wants promotions to highlight families watching favorite TV shows in their dens, rather than showing a TV hanging on a wall to make a den look high-tech.
Best Buy's Flanigan reviewed ads from Insignia's major competitors in an effort to better understand how their promotional messages connected to their target customers. One competing brand's advertising showed its television hanging on the wall, while an ad for another brand showed how a large screen can get you close to the sports-related action. Neither of these ads was created especially for in-store networks; and they were 30-second broadcast ads. Based on the review of these and other ads, Flanigan and his team developed a two-tier advertising strategy for the Insignia brand, with the first step focusing on generating brand awareness and the second step portraying the desired lifestyle message.
The first ad created for this campaign had a running time of 31 seconds and was totally visual (with no audio commentary). This approach enables a consumer to get the full message in a noisy store or in stores that do not play the audio portions of ads to reduce noise levels. The ad portrayed several home environments for Insignia products. While each video stressed Insignia HDTVs, Blu-ray DVD players were also included to show an enhanced product line for the brand. Insignia ads were timed to run every 10 to 12 minutes; other brands ran less often because they had to pay for these in-store promotions.
This campaign was highly successful. For a two-month period after the initial in-store promotion, sales for every Insignia-branded model increased (including an older-model 720p plasma model that had seen two months of declining sales). One Insignia model's sales increased by 149 percent, a second by 116 percent, and a third by 69 percent.
The second Insignia ad featured a real family going through the process of purchasing and installing an Insignia HDTV, and then watching a movie in their home on this television. While the running time of the ad was 74 seconds, it was seen on-screen for only 10 seconds.
Paul Flanigan believes that one of the factors accounting for the success of each campaign was that they were created especially for Best Buy's in-store network. Flanigan also feels that traditional broadcast commercials will not engage an in-store customer; to be most effective, ads must show the relationship of the product to a customer's lifestyle-as opposed to merely focusing on a product's features.
Questions
1. Develop five measures of brand awareness that can serve as objectives for Best Buy's advertising efforts for Insignia products.
2. How would advertising developed specifically for an in-store network differ from traditional television-based network advertising for Insignia
3. Should the Insignia brand be promoted through over-the-air TV ads, as well as in-store ads Why or why not
4. What sales promotions should Best Buy use for the Insignia brand Explain your answer.