Best Buy CEO Corie Barry on brand refresh, bringing purpose to life

Best Buy’s Corie Barry doesn’t want consumers to just think of the retailer as a place to buy their next technology purchase.

Barry, who was named CEO of the consumer electronics retailer in June 2019, wants consumers to reimagine Best Buy as the place to discover and interact with new technology.

“We were in a board meeting … and a board member asked me, ‘How do you want people to feel about your brand, Corie?’ I thought about it, and I thought about the best days I’m ever in a Best Buy,” Barry said during a fireside chat with NRF President Matthew Shay at NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show. “I walk by an end cap or something, and I see an employee standing with a customer and I hear one phrase: ‘I had no idea I could do that.’”

This idea of discovery and consumer empowerment has been the driving philosophy behind Best Buy’s latest brand refresh —”imagine that,” which includes not only a new tagline, but a refreshed color palette, new personalization features on its app, more video content and new experiential spaces in hundreds of its stores to showcase the latest tech.

Retail today is not about the product or technology being sold, but how you translate it to the customer’s life and needs, Barry said.

“Innovation that actually resonates with the customers in a way that only our Blue Shirts can bring it to life: That’s what the brand stands for. And nobody else does it the way we do it in consumer electronics. It’s the beautiful embodiment about what’s unique about Best Buy.”

The brand refresh was necessary in light of all the changes to retail since Best Buy was founded in 1966 as an audio specialty store — especially changes in the last five years, Barry said. “At Best Buy, one of our core values established by our founder Dick Schultz is learning from challenges and change … and that never served us better than in 2020 when we were thrown the ultimate change,” she said.

Everything about Best Buy’s business model has changed in some significant way over the last five years, she said. The retailer is much more digital, the store experience is much more specialized, the workforce is now more market-based, and how Best Buy goes to market is much different, including the upcoming roll out of Best Buy Marketplace. “Everything is different than the Best Buy of five years ago,” she said.

But perhaps the biggest change driver has been customer expectations. “What’s driven all the change we just talked about is a consumer who shops incredibly differently than they used to and has higher expectations.”

Post-pandemic, consumers were burned out on technology and shopping out of need and necessity, Barry said. In addition, consumers have gotten much better at researching technology on their own. “They don’t always need us to be the technical experts,” she said, “which was hard for us.”

What consumers do need is to know exactly how a piece of consumer technology will fit into, and improve, their lives, which is where the Best Buy brand refresh comes in.

“’Imagine that’ embodies what we do need our people to do. We need our people to take what they know and translate it to what matters to the customer,” Barry said. “Our purpose is to enrich lives through technology. We do that by humanizing it. So, for our team, I don’t care if you work in accounting, legal, technology, you can humanize by your nature what it is we do. So, bringing that to life and then really lifting up examples of how we do that and how we show up.”

Barry pointed to a Best Buy store in Asheville, N.C., in a community devastated by floods after Hurricane Helene. The store, which had been subject to the flooding, opened the next day for curbside pickups for orders. Why? Because Best Buy was part of the community and the community needed them, Barry said.

“Purpose isn’t just about this little tag line, feeling thing,” Barry said. For Best Buy employees, it’s about being part of the community, both inside the store and outside of it. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons employees say they stay with the company, she said.

“Our general manager turnover right now in our stores is 5%. Seventy-five percent of our managers came from either hourly or seasonal work and now they run multi-million boxes. I ask them why they stay, and it’s because they believe in what we do. They believe in the role we play in our communities. They believe in how we can change people’s lives with technology … and as hard as the pandemic was, I think our teams would say, it was when we felt we could bring that purpose to life the most.”