Big-Box Briefing: The themes that will dominate Jason Bonfig’s tenure as Best Buy’s new CEO
This is the latest installment of the Big-Box Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the strategies of major retailers. More from the series →
The biggest electronics retailer in the U.S. ushered in a new era this week.
On Nov. 1, Jason Bonfig — a 27-year Best Buy veteran who most recently served as the company’s chief customer, product and fulfillment officer — became the CEO. He succeeds Corie Barry. The move had been announced months prior, with Barry saying in a press release at the time, “I’ve worked closely with Jason for many years and can confidently say he’s the right person, with the right vision, to accelerate the company’s strategy and take Best Buy into the future.”
Beyond the fact that it is welcoming a new CEO, Best Buy is at a major inflection point for a number of reasons. The company is operating at a point in time when many consumers are likely to upgrade their TVs, their computers or their appliances over the next few years. Artificial intelligence is also poised to usher in a wave of technological innovation. And Best Buy, like many other retailers, is increasingly making money in more ways than just selling physical products in stores. The company’s advertising business and its third-party marketplace are also becoming bigger areas of focus.
Here are the major themes we expect to dominate our coverage of Best Buy over the next few years as the company enters its Jason Bonfig era.
A refreshed approach to merchandising in the age of AI innovations
Best Buy is trying to turn the page after a somewhat bruising 2025, when revenue declined 4.43% year over year.
One of the big challenges plaguing Best Buy over the past few years is that many consumers splurged on big-ticket electronics in 2020 and 2021, while they were flush with cash from stimulus checks. But consumers don’t need to buy a new TV or a new gaming system every year and, in turn, Best Buy has been faced with tougher comps.
But Bonfig and Barry made the case during Best Buy’s second-quarter earnings call in August that many shoppers are about to enter the replenishment cycle for TVs they bought during the pandemic, which creates a lucrative opportunity for Best Buy. “There were about 49 million TVs that were purchased in 2020 in the industry, and we think this is a multiyear replacement cycle,” Bonfig said.
Best Buy is using the opportunity to try and sell consumers on a new type of TV: the RGB LED TV, as Modern Retail’s Mitchell Parton previously reported. Best Buy is painting this as “the first major upgrade to television screens since OLED.”
Best Buy worked with vendor partners like LG and Samsung to secure retail exclusivity at launch, and it trained more than 15,000 employees and vendor representatives on RGB LED TVs ahead of the launch.
The RGB TV news is just one example of how Best Buy is likely to pursue a refreshed approach to category growth and merchandising under Bonfig: coalesce around a new technology or innovation in a category, work with vendors to secure some type of exclusivity or unique display, and train employees on how to sell consumers on this new innovation. Bonfig has previously said that AI glasses, for example, are “a significant growth trend” for Best Buy.
During the second-quarter earnings call in August, Bonfig and Barry said Best Buy was seeing positive sales growth in categories like home theater and home appliances. However, other categories are still lagging. Best Buy said comparable sales in gaming were down in the second quarter, largely because there was no big sales moment like last year’s launch of the Nintendo Switch 2.
“Consistent with the past several quarters, we see a customer who is still spending, but is value-focused and attracted to sales moments,” Barry said during the earnings call.
Best Buy recently launched a new area of its website dedicated to gaming, called Best Buy Gamers. The section is intended to alert gamers to the latest news, promotions and offers, but also to draw buzz around big moments in gaming.
Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, agreed that Best Buy is poised to benefit as replacement and innovation cycles pick up in electronics. But, he added, “Many consumers remain cautious about big-ticket purchases, so every retailer, including Best Buy, needs to convince them to spend big,” he said in an email.
Rethinking the store experience
When Bonfig was announced as CEO in the spring, he laid out four major priorities. Two of those, “elevating the Best Buy experience” and “continuing to be a human-powered and customer-focused company,” essentially tie back to the same end goal: improving the consumer journey.
The physical store is where many consumers still encounter Best Buy most frequently. “The store experience is variable,” Saunders said. “Some of the older stores need refurbishment and rejuvenation, as they look tired and are not sufficiently interesting or inspiring. However, Best Buy is aware of this and is making investments.”
One area for potential that Bonfig sees is in “reallocating space to higher value experiences,” citing Meta Labs at Best Buy as one example.
These are, essentially, shop-in-shops — as of August, Best Buy was halfway through opening 50 of these Meta Labs. But Best Buy argues that a key differentiator is that employees are specially trained on products within that ecosystem — in Meta’s case, AI glasses and virtual reality headsets. Many of these Meta Lab spaces are also strategically placed at the front of the store to promote Best Buy as a place to try on new products, as experiential retail becomes a bigger focus.
“It’s creating something that gives customers a reason to make the trip to Best Buy, and it almost turns the stores into a bit of a playground again,” Best Buy executive vice president and chief revenue officer Patrick McGinnis said over the summer when he joined the Modern Retail Podcast.
“Although still early, customer response has been exceptionally strong and has exceeded our initial expectations,” Bonfig said during the second-quarter earnings call in August. “Based on what we are seeing, we believe there is significant potential to expand this model to additional vendor partners.”
Bigger bets on retail media and marketplace sellers
Another one of Bonfig’s major priorities is to grow Best Buy’s retail media business. Best Buy Ads is on track to deliver 10% growth this year, Bonfig shared during the August earnings call.
Compared to other retailers, Best Buy’s advertising business is more mature. Best Buy first launched its retail advertising arm in 2010 before rebranding it to Best Buy Ads in 2022.
It’s a tough environment for retail media businesses generally. A recent survey from eMarketer and Bain & Company found that 31% of retail media leaders expect to come in below their growth plans for 2026.
But Andrew Lipsman, an independent analyst with Ads, Media + Commerce, previously told Modern Retail that one of the things that sets Best Buy’s retail media business apart from others is its third-party marketplace, as that helps create a more predictable revenue stream that can help fuel the company’s advertising business.
Best Buy previously had a third-party marketplace from 2011 to 2016. But it ended up driving only about 1% of Best Buy’s revenue and confused customers who, at the time, weren’t as accustomed to ordering a product from a third-party seller on a well-known brick-and-mortar retailer’s website.
Then in 2025, Best Buy decided to take another crack at launching a marketplace. Barry said that, this time, the experience would be highly curated and powered by tech company Mirakl.
Right now, the marketplace-advertising flywheel appears to be working. Bonfig said during the second-quarter earnings call in August that the marketplace was experiencing “stronger-than-expected performance” and was expected to reach $1.3 billion GMV in the third quarter.
In addition, the company’s Chief Ads and Media Officer, Lisa Valentino, has been working to take the retail media business into new areas. In September, the company launched Best Buy CTV, “a new offering that combines Best Buy’s first-party shopper audiences, device ownership data and purchase-intent signals with premium CTV inventory from partners,” a spokesperson said at the time.
Offerings like Best Buy CTV “fit smartly into Best Buy’s core competencies,” Lipsman said at the time. “Best Buy’s unique advantage is that it’s a category leader in consumer electronics. Many of the world’s largest advertisers have to be active with Best Buy Ads. They also have mega national media budgets, and Best Buy is building out strong offerings to capture even more of those valuable budgets.”
But, as Best Buy’s previous retreat from its marketplace shows, there can be moments in time when parts of the flywheel stop working. And Bonfig’s job as CEO is now to keep all these engine parts humming along.
As he laid out his strategic priorities during the August earnings call, Bonfig acknowledged that all of these initiatives — retail media, in-store experiences — “reinforce each other.”
“A better experience delivered through the right footprints and formats drives reach,” he said. “Greater reach generates customer insights that fuel us as a media and technology company,” he said.
What I’m reading
- Reuters looks at how the rise of AI shopping agents poses a conundrum for Amazon and Walmart: These agents could threaten their advertising revenue.
- Wayfair posted its strongest quarterly earnings since the pandemic, making the case that it is doing a better job of winning a greater share of the home furnishings market, even as the housing market remains sluggish.
- Uber reported slowing revenue growth during its fiscal third-quarter earnings (though revenue was still up 10% year over year), thanks in part to rising fuel prices.