The electronics chain that let customers shop its rival inside its own stores

By 2012, Best Buy had a very specific problem with a very specific name: showrooming. Customers walked into its stores, found the television or laptop they wanted, pulled out a smartphone, compared the price on Amazon right there in the aisle, and either asked for a price match or simply bought it online on the spot. Best Buy paid for the real estate, the staff, and the inventory. Amazon got the sale. Stores deteriorated, morale dropped, and analysts predicted a slow death for a chain that had once dominated consumer electronics.

Kotler and Armstrong use Best Buy's turnaround to make a point about the marketing environment: the forces around a company, from new technology to shifting consumer behaviour, are not something a business controls, but they are something a business can adapt to, often by doing the opposite of the obvious defensive move.

Best Buy's obvious move would have been to fight showrooming, perhaps by discouraging customers from comparing prices in-store. Instead, it embraced it. The chain began matching Amazon's prices outright, removing price as a reason to leave. Then it leaned into what an online-only retailer could never offer: real stores, staffed by knowledgeable people, where customers could touch a product before buying it. Best Buy went further still, inviting the very competitors that threatened it, including Amazon, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft, to run branded showcase spaces inside its stores, a practice Best Buy started calling showcasing rather than showrooming.

At the same time, Best Buy rebuilt its own digital and delivery operations so thoroughly that by the time the COVID-19 pandemic forced stores to close, it could shift almost entirely online overnight, using its physical locations as pickup and shipping hubs. Its online revenue reached record levels during that period, and even after stores reopened, online sales stayed well above where they'd been before the pandemic.

The company also recognised something about the environment beyond retail competition: as consumer electronics grew more complex, customers didn't just want a product, they wanted someone to help them understand it. Best Buy built out an army of in-home technology consultants and a repair and support service called the Geek Squad to answer that need. None of this reversed the forces reshaping retail. Amazon still exists, still has advantages Best Buy will never match. But Best Buy stopped resisting the environment it was in and started building a strategy that fit it, which is the entire difference between the many electronics retailers that went out of business in the same decade and the one that didn't.

Name the specific force working against your current approach, precisely, not a vague sense that business feels harder, but the actual shift, technology, or habit undermining you. Then ask whether there's a way to work with that disruptive behavior instead of blocking it, the way a company might turn a threat into a showcase rather than a fight. Identify what you can offer that a purely digital or purely new competitor structurally cannot match, and put your energy there. And fix the operational gap, whether it's delivery, service, or support, that keeps getting exposed, before a crisis forces your hand. The businesses that survive disruption are rarely the ones that resisted hardest.