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After a successful run for many years as a resilient consumer electronics giant, Best Buy was under intense pressure at the end of 2014. Even as competitors like Circuit City melted away, Best Buy had been able to withstand the onslaught of online behemoth Amazon and discount retailers like Target and Walmart. However, its competitive position was threatened as online shopping became more popular, particularly among millennial customers.

With a new leadership team, Best Buy had recently undertaken bold initiatives to expand and refine its online presence and position itself for success. These initiatives had produced encouraging results, but Best Buy needed to do more to stem the loss of market share to Amazon and to become more relevant to millennial customers. To address these challenges, Best Buy approached the Kellogg School of Management to solicit ideas from student teams by sponsoring a Business Challenge competition. The teams came up with several strategic initiatives. Best Buy needed to evaluate these initiatives on two criteria: First, how well did these initiatives leverage Best Buy's privileged physical assets (stores, salespeople, and Geek Squad services staff) to create a winning customer experience? Second, how effective would these initiatives be in attracting and retaining millennial customers?

The purpose of this paper is to create a strategy for “Best Buy”, a major consumer electronics and appliance retailer in the USA, to improve their service system to ensure that they can continuously gain market share. This study will examine and analyze Best Buy's store service blueprint in comparison to its competitors' service blueprints. The study will then examine Best Buy Geek Squad's service blueprint and recommend improvements that can be implemented to provide higher quality service to Best Buy's customers.

A combination of design methods was used which included creating multiple service blueprints and implementing the Six Sigma DMAIC approach. A Service Quality (SERVQUAL) Survey was conducted and analyzed the data, to give an understanding of customer satisfaction with the service provided at Best Buy, compared to its major competitors. The service blueprint was analyzed and strategies were recommended to improve the present system, with the goal of providing better customer service and an improved shopping experience. With the recommendations an “improved service model” for Best Buy was created, along with fail safe mechanisms to ensure that service guarantees will be met.

In the Six Sigma DMAIC Process Improvement approach, poka‐yokes were implemented to improve the Best Buy service blueprint, which were identified through cause‐and‐effect diagrams that were created. By implementing the new service blueprint, along with the poka‐yokes, Best Buy will see a significant improvement in customer satisfaction.

Best Buy and other retail service providers should consider investing in adequate staffing of technically savvy and customer sensitive store associates and implement customer service training programs to improve their education relating specifically to the quality of service delivery to their customers.

This paper focuses on the business case for implementing Six Sigma tools to improve the service provided by retailers. This should lead to long‐term profitability and improved customer service.

In 2007, Best Buy was the leading electronics retailer in the United States with more than 941 stores, revenue totaling $31 billion, and a market cap of $21 billion. In 2005, Best Buy had adopted a new business model, culture, and customer-segmentation template called Customer Centricity. This move created volatility in the price of Best Buy stock because of the higher-than-expected employee costs that went with this new way of doing business and the difficulty of executing the old and the new business models simultaneously while the new model was rolled out. Best Buy responded to Wall Street's short-term focus in a myriad of ways. It first asked for investor patience, and stressed the strong operating results achieved in Best Buy stores operating under the new model. But in June 2007, after the stock dropped again, the CEO knew he had to decide whether to open more Best Buy stores, increase the company's dividend, or increase the stock-repurchase program.

The purpose of this paper is to assess to what extent the Smoking and Alcohol Drinking Behavior Survey (SADBeS), the national alcohol survey, could be used in monitoring goals and cost-effective measures suggested by the National Alcohol Strategy (NAS) issued by public health authorities in 2010.

The NAS was reviewed. Strategies, measures, and corresponding indicators were extracted. Questionnaire items used in the 2014 SADBeS were assessed in comparison with those indicators.

Four primary indicators indicate overall success of the NAS. In all, 6 out of 15 measures were in accordance with best-buy or good-buy policies – cost-effective policies suggested by the World Health Organization. After excluding indicators unlikely to be obtained from population-based surveys, the SADBeS could be used in monitoring 5 out of 14 indicators corresponding to best-buy or good-buy measures. Of 103 questionnaire items, 26.2 percent of items could be used to monitor primary indicators of the NAS; 34.0 percent could be used to estimate indicators corresponding to best-buy or good-buy measures. Overall, only 35.0 percent of questionnaire items provided useful information for monitoring primary indicators and cost-effective measures suggested in the NAS.

The SADBeS questionnaire items should be added or replaced to cover feasibly obtained indicators corresponding to best-buy or good-buy policies in the next wave of the survey.

This is the first study addressing the compatibility between the national strategy and the national alcohol survey. It also includes the overview of Thailand’s alcohol strategy, which is, to the author’s knowledge, never presented in any English articles.

There's never been a better time to buy a PC, whether it's your first system, a replacement, or an addition. Values have improved enormously in the past year, and you can now get reasonably good values even from the traditionally high‐priced vendors. That doesn't mean you should automatically buy the best‐known brand. You'll still do much better by evaluating your needs, understanding what's important in a PC (and how to look for it), and looking over the marketplace carefully. If you're reading Library Hi Tech back‐to‐front, skip to Looking Back #1: it provides important background for this article. In this article the author discusses various aspects of PC purchasing in 1993, focusing on what matters now. He discusses the numbers that count, critical aspects of a system that are sometimes ignored in reviews, and the advantages and disadvantages of bundling. He offers some notes on brand names and suppliers, but cautions that completely safe purchases are nearly impossible. The article concludes with notes from the literature received between October and December 1992.

As an alternative to the two extremes of protecting and extending the core business versus transforming it, the article aims to propose two other renewal strategies, “leverage” and “build,” that together provide a pathway for continuous renewal.

This article looks at the case of Best Buy, which has progressively used “leverage” and “build” strategies to modify its competence platform from an early emphasis on operational excellence to complement it with modularity, flexibility and customer centricity. Correspondingly, its market reach has grown from Minnesota to all of North America with recent forays into China.

When the firm's performance did not meet expectations, top management did not focus merely on better execution; rather it questioned if the firm's vision needed to be revised. Best Buy's renewal journey is guided by a continuous re‐visioning of the company, or in Best Buy's jargon continuous re‐“Concept”ualization of the company. Best Buy has transformed itself via six concepts, Concepts I‐VII, with the change from one to the next accelerating over the years.

The article explains how a firm can use these two renewal strategies to perform a dramatic transformation, but through an evolutionary process not a revolutionary one.

The case illustrates the implementation of “leverage” and “build” strategies that together provide a pathway for continuous renewal.

An updated version of the original (1985) text, the book covers all aspects of marketing and selling bank services: the role of marketing; behaviour of customers; intelligence, planning and organisation; product decisions; promotion decisions; place decisions; price decisions; achieving sales. Application questions help to focus the readers' minds on key issues affecting practice.

This paper aims to form a best practice guide on how to successfully customize employees' work experience to engage the workforce and boost talent retention, as well as employee performance and productivity to the benefit of the organization and its workforce.

For the new book Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management through Customization, research was carried out involving in‐depth interviews with more than two dozen employees, 70 executives, over 100 top organizations and a survey of 557 US employees. Using this information, as well as extensive focus on Best Buy as a case study organization that has successfully implemented customization approaches, this paper aims to demonstrate that addressing the needs of the individual and tailoring the work experience ultimately fosters a high‐performing motivated workforce.

Many organizations are now working to create a customizable work experience for their employees, utilizing customization experiences familiar to those aimed at consumers by the marketing function. Through the interviews, Accenture was able to identify four main approaches to workforce customization, which are manageable, scalable, reliable and just.

Just like employees, companies are all different, with unique strategies, histories, type of employees, values and cultures. As such, their best approach in creating a customization strategy is to use those customization approaches that best suit their unique needs. By using one or more of the workforce‐of‐one customization approaches, organizations can enjoy a substantial impact across the board.

The customization approaches identified by Accenture – segmentation of the workforce, offering modular choices, defining broad and simple rules, and fostering employee‐defined personalization – avoids the usual pitfalls associated with workforce customization, such as a plethora of one‐off individual side deals, which can foster a negative workplace dynamic. Instead they offer an opportunity to establish more flexible systems, radically redefining the way HR supports its employees, yet ultimately creating a strong competitive advantage for the organization.

How can you call yourself a serious computer user if you don't have a 33MHz 486 system with a 16″ 1024×768 Super VGA screen and 300MB disk drive? Run right out and get the new goodies—otherwise, you're wasting your precious time. The above is an extreme position. On the other hand, if you're still using the equivalent of an IBM PC/XT (or, worse yet, an original PC), you're at the other extreme. Quite apart from the hype, you would almost certainly benefit from a more powerful PC. For most of us in the real world who are spending real dollars for equipment to serve real needs, the decisions can be tough: upgrade, replace, or let it be? And, if upgrading is the answer, what should you upgrade? This column deals with hardware questions. While there are few firm rules, there are some reasonable guidelines to consider. The author also provides notes from January‐June 1991 PC literature; it's been a great period for powermongers!