Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

DECONSTRUCTING BSN

BSN is broken into four aspects: the Water Cooler, the Wiki, the Loop Marketplace, and Tag Trade.

The Water Cooler is a fairly standard message board for employees that allows them to post, add to, and build on their own content and experiences. The Loop Marketplace lets staff members bounce innovation ideas for new services off one another, with the best ones qualifying for funding and testing from corporate. What makes this even more sublime is that if an idea doesn’t get picked up, it can still be adopted by other stores and, if proven successful, the idea’s success essentially overrides the corporate decision-making process. Finally, Tag Trade is Best Buy’s prediction market, a Web-enabled stock-market game where employees trade stock or votes on how they think a particular idea will do. It’s like an internal version of the popular consumer voting engine, Digg. Through Tag Trade, corporate predictions are reconciled with rock-face sentiment that has proven to deliver precision accuracy for the company.

The implications for inventory management, service support, and logistics planning are sublime.

BSN has become a central resource for testing and implementing several key initiatives against some of the company’s core objectives. It collects real-time feedback for stress-testing and even implementing ideas in significantly shorter lead times. One particular internal challenge was encouraging younger employees to sign up for Best Buy’s 401(k) program, ...