Dive Brief:

• Best Buy on May 9 launched a new marketing plan with a tagline "Let’s talk about what’s possible," that includes an overhaul of its logo. The retailer has swept away the old "Expert Service. Unbeatable Price" of past campaigns.

• "Best Buy" still appears in bold font, but the retailer’s signature yellow tag is now a smaller illustrative element rather than in the background. It’s the first logo refresh in three years and is designed to work with today’s digital media, according to a company blog post.

• The electronics retailer May 13 is also debuting new ads, focusing on "the Best Buy experience" rather than products. The spots, directed by award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, are black-and-white depictions of conversations with customers and Best Buy employees, whose bright blue shirts provide the only pop of color.

Dive Insight:

Declaring its "Renew Blue" turnaround effort — focused on cost cuts, store closures, merchandise changes and improved customer service that halted its declines — "over," Best Buy is now committed to growth with a series of moves in the less defensive "Best Buy 2020: Building the New Blue." 

That includes "expanding what the company sells and evolving how it sells," executives said last year at the company's investors day conference last September. In April, the retailer announced a partnership with Amazon to be the exclusive brick-and-mortar seller of Amazon's Fire TVs and said it would open its first new store in seven years. 

"Telling the story of our people — and how we make a meaningful impact on customers’ lives — is at the heart of this work," Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Whit Alexander said in the blog post this week. "Our people are our insurmountable advantage."

The retailer has executed a turnaround that has effectively countered Amazon's market share gains in a way that other electronics retailers have failed to do. Key to Best Buy's proposition is its in-store and at-home customer service, experts have told Retail Dive. 

Best Buy, Circuit City, RadioShack and a host of smaller players in recent years were challenged by lower-cost warehouse stores and underpricing on the internet. But Best Buy remains unvanquished. "By intensely focusing on consumer expectations both in store and online, the company found its footing and today is the unquestioned leader in its category," Nick Egelanian, president of retail development consultants SiteWorks International, told Retail Dive in an email earlier this year.

When the "dust settles" on e-commerce's expansion, physical stores will still be delivering 85% of retail goods and services and may well be responsible for up to a third of "omnichannel" dollars spent, Egelanian said. Best Buy is set up well for that scenario, he said.

"To consumers, the issue is delivery on their expectation of price and convenience, regardless of channel," he said. "Best Buy is extremely well positioned to both dominate its category in the brick-and-mortar realm while also offering the range of alternative choices and pricing that consumers expect on the internet."