Relative values

We have a familiar face on the cover this month. Mike Linton, Best Buy's executive vice president and chief marketing officer, was named one of our Marketers of the Year in January. He was also featured on the cover of this magazine in December 2001, along with his colleague Debbie Estes, who runs the Best Buy's promotions and events group. In that earlier story, we focused on the retailer's savvy use of music tie-ins to lend it marketing heft. As he told it then, Best Buy's goal that year was to “make every promotion bigger and better than the last.”

While the “better” part still applies, we detected a different emphasis this time in terms of scale. Like many marketers, Linton and his team seem interested these days in a more intimate relationship with their customers. As our Senior Editor Betsy Spethmann found during a recent visit with the company, personalizing the Best Buy experience for each person walking through its doors has become the new mantra for Linton and the Best Buy marketing group.

Within one company, Best Buy exemplifies much of the latest thinking in marketing: relate to your audience not as a monolithic pool, but as individuals; use the latest technology in innovative ways that make the brand experience more relevant and fun; and don't be afraid to let the consumer steer the relationship with your brand — you'll create a stronger bond as a result.

Let's credit the marketers who have found ways to add these principles to their planning for the healthy growth (8.9%) reported for promotions in 2004. We've spent months polling both brand marketers and agency executives, as well as assorted industry experts, to assemble this year's Industry Trends Report. In fact, we have so much data, we couldn't fit it all into this issue. For a complete set of our data, be sure to visit promomagazine.com.