Featured Project: BrightSign Players Help Transform Best Buy Canada Signage

Los Gatos, California-based digital signage media player manufacturer BrightSign announces that its media players played a major role in transforming some of Best Buy Canada‘s “experience” stores.

According to the retailer, the company several years ago anticipated a growing need to provide its customers with more interactivity in its retail locations, and to that end it embarked on a multi-year effort to enhance approximately 30 of what it calls its “premier experience” stores.

Best Buy Canada operates 134 big box stores in Canada and an additional 49 Best Buy Mobile stores.

Best Buy contracted with Georgia-based Convergent Media Systems, a digital signage software provider that also has an office in Toronto. Convergent is a company focused on building innovative interactive experiences on the BrightSign platform.

By integrating with Best Buy Canada’s software, Convergent developed much of the back-end content flow for the new system using BrightSign’s BrightAuthor software platform. BrightSign’s XD1033 digital signage media players drive content on the various displays, enabling the interactive customer experiences and triggering product demos when selected by the customer.

“Our goal is to help customers enrich their lives through technology with a rewarding shopping experience, both online and in-store,” says Sean Wilson, vice president of store design for Best Buy Canada. “To deliver on this promise, we invested heavily in the latest interactive digital signage to make it easy for our in-store customers to enjoy an immersive shopping experience unmatched by our competitors.”

The upgraded experience stores feature several new zones, each designed to enhance the shopping experience with interactive displays that enable customers to learn about and even demo the products they’re considering. The company says its “endless aisle” concept is central to the redesign-using interactive displays to deliver near-limitless information about products on the retail floor, as well as other products that can be ordered online and delivered to customers’ homes.

Some of these new zones are:

A Dolby “ATMOS Experience” invites customers to enjoy the comfort of a home theater setting and use a touchscreen controller to immerse themselves in an ATMOS-powered sight and sound environment. By selecting featured videos and toggling between ATMOS, stereo and soundbar audio options, customers can explore and imagine how this technology might sound in their home.

“Smart Home” allows customers to switch between a variety of products, learning about the benefits of each and how they can improve and secure their homes.

Traditional areas of the store, like appliances and computing solutions, are also offering customers more information and options than ever before, the retailer says, thanks to the interactive displays.

In total, Best Buy Canada’s stores offer more than a dozen interactive experiences with a variety of triggers and touch options, all driven by BrightSign’s media players.

“This high-visibility project demanded the very best hardware to ensure flawless operation,” says John Campbell, Convergent’s senior vice president, technology and operations. “BrightSign’s players deliver the reliability we needed, along with the flexibility to create and manage content exactly as Best Buy envisioned, and deliver a superior customer experience.”

Ultimately, Best Buy says, it will be doing more upgrades beyond just the 30 original stores. Best Buy Canada recently was named Retail Innovator of the Year by a Canadian marketing magazine, and the reward was based on the success of their new experience store format.