Best Buy: Short Case Study

Taking a commercial of Best Buy in 2013 as a short case study, this essay will briefly analyze some significant characteristics of the international business communication. To begin with, it is relevant to cover a short development history of Best Buy to provide readers with the first image of what kind of company Best Buy is. Best Buy was founded in 1966 in Saint Paul, Minnesota by Richard M. Schulze and some other co-founders under with the original name of “Sound of Music” to provide retail service mainly on consumer electronics. As the business has been flourishing, in 1983, “Sound of Music” was changed into Best Buy and was listed in the New York Stock Exchange later in 1987. According to Reuters (2012), Best Buy is the largest consumer

As mentioned above, the three differences between these two characters that I want to analyze are gender, ethnics and business relationship. First of all, gender difference can be clearly seen in this context where the female customer mainly uses verbal communication to acquire information from the male seller without letting him time to response. Moreover, the female customer also shows a lot of facial expression or even touching to the male seller (when the customer is trying the 3D TV). From that case, viewers can sense some gender differences such as women talk more and show more expression than man. Secondly, throughout the behavior, viewers can also see the ethnic difference between these two characters. In spite of the fact that they are both using English, which is a low-context and direct language, the way they use can also show the ethnic background. The American customers tend to overlap the seller speech while the Asian seller almost waits for the American customer to stop her sentences. Additionally, it is also easy for people to recognize that the Asian seller is more gentle and formal while the American customer is more casual. Finally, the business relationship seems to make the seller more tolerable to the customer’s behaviors in the case. Although the customer uses

The first policy that we can recognize from this video is that every staff has to wear uniform at work. This policy suggests that Best Buy wants to create a harmony working environment where everyone is treated equally. Not only showing their willing to offering equal treatment by having uniform, Best Buy also has many non-white American staff on advertisements as their strong determination on having equal and diverse working environment. Therefore, based on Best Buy social performance, I believe that it should belong to ‘Phase IV Global’ in the International Corporate Evolution Model suggested by Nancy J. Adler