• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, September 9, 2009

Last year, when Best Buy announced it had opened a store in Aurora, Colo., just to appeal to women -- a concept that included civilized lighting, signs that made sense, and nice restrooms -- it got our attention. And then last May, when the Minneapolis-based retailer said it had tapped two marketing executives to create "a whole new leadership model" to increase its share among women, we really started wondering. So Marketing Daily caught up with Liz Haesler, Best Buy's VP of Home Life and Trend, to explain exactly how the consumer-electronics giant is wooing women -- both inside and out.

Q: Even though women spend about $90 billion a year on consumer electronics, marketing is typically aimed at men. What made Best Buy decide it could change that?

A: The company started its Women's Leadership Forum, or WOLF @Best Buy, five years ago. We realized our stores were not a female-friendly place to work, and Julie Gilbert, who founded the program, saw a need for a network of women within the company. So these WOLF packs started to grow, and are now all over the country, and insights from them have made their way into our business strategies. And while there are a number of companies that have mentoring projects in place to work with women employees, this was different -- it was always customer-centric.

Q: How important are women customers to Best Buy?

A: Very. In appliances, for example, women influence 85% of all purchases.

Q: How is Best Buy doing with them?

A: Even though we've had a decade of ridiculously smart people running this business, when we asked women shoppers, they said things like: 'We didn't even know you carried appliances.' Right now, we're in the midst of working on a whole new approach to appliances in the Atlanta area. We've discovered, for example, that the vignettes we'd built in stores to showcase our appliances didn't help her make decisions -- her questions are more along the lines of 'Will my oversized dishes fit in here? What about wine glasses?' These are very easy things to address -- we just needed to ask her what she wanted first.

Q: How do women typically see your stores?

A: I recently worked on a project with 150 of our "megas," a group of supersmart customers we tap for insights. We flew them out to an event and had a two-and-half-hour town hall meeting with them. At dinner, they said things like: "I wouldn't ever shop in your store. The music is too loud. It's too ugly."

Q: How did some of those opinions shape the Aurora store, and how is it doing?

A: That store design is specifically driven by female customers, and they worked alongside us in store planning, influencing things like display, signage and the way we use endcaps. It's doing well, and everyone is so pleased with the results -- it's like a lab, and we're using those insights in other stores.

Q: What are the biggest opportunities?

A: There are lots of unmet needs. Right now, we see some of our best opportunities in services, through our Geek Squad, appliances, and mobile. Some of it is about store environment, and some of it about products that appeal to women -- like Bluetooth headsets that can accommodate earrings and glasses.

Q: How important is a range of products?

A: Very. For example, one of the hot new products we've got coming up next month are very pricey jeweled ear buds, a line by Lady Gaga called Heart Beats. That's going to appeal to a very different kind of woman than, let's say, our best-selling Insignia DVD player, which has a long battery life for car trips and can handle kids spilling on it.

Motorola's Pink Razr was certainly an early example of a product that combined women-friendly styling with performance, but look at flat-panel TVs -- they've become part of the décor of the house. Women look at things like color and shape differently, and there have to be plenty of choices.

Q: So how does a program that mentors women translate to increased sales?

A: We really are so dedicated, as a retailer, to increasing our market share. A big piece of that is being a better place to work. Retention, having career opportunities, mentoring -- there is such an upside in all these things, because working together, we can see where women are underserved. It helps us meet the needs of our customers.