Lowe and behold: Jennifer Wilson has been promoted as Lowe’s new CMO and things are about to change.
The marketing veteran, who first joined Lowe’s in 2006, comes to her new role with 20 years of experience across marketing and merchandising. More recently, she was the SVP of enterprise brand and marketing at the home improvement brand and has also previously done various leadership stints at marketing and advertising agencies.
As the CMO, however, Wilson will have a lot on her plate, such as overseeing strategic brand and product marketing, loyalty and personalization, along with promotional planning, creative, media, and Lowe’s retail media network.
But while she has only been in her role for a couple of weeks now, she already has some grand ideas for the iconic home improvement retailer.
In a conversation with Retail Brew, Wilson talks about maintaining customer loyalty, her biggest challenges and what she aims to prioritize at the brand moving forward.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
On shifting customer loyalties
We know what happened through the pandemic obviously had a huge impact on home…Home took center stage and, and the beautiful thing about the tail end of [the pandemic] is that it still is the center stage for the better part of our population.
We’ve done some research coming out of the pandemic and our data says that 65% of consumers are actually not loyal to any one retailer when it comes to home improvement. That’s not just with our primary competitor; that’s really across the entire retail ethos. [The] 65% of people who just sort of grab something here, there and everywhere—to get one more trip out of that customer segment is worth a lot of money.
Customers expect and want more from brands today…That really led to the impetus of MyLowe’s rewards: the notion that we’re giving you points for every dollar that you spend with us, [and] those points turn into MyLowe’s money. But we're also adding on to that with free standard shipping, with free gifts. So we had our first member gift this spring where we gave all of our members free flowers in the spring.
On the role of AI and personalization
You can imagine that when you think about the richness of customer data through a loyalty program, the beauty comes in making sure that you can personalize the experience that consumer has with your brand from there on out. There’s a mutual expectation through that value exchange: If I’m willing to sign up for your loyalty program, that you’re going to give me an experience that’s not like somebody who’s not willing to give you your data. [We have] a customer marketing team…that’s in place that is rapidly evaluating insights, both programmatically, or in an automated fashion, but also we’ve got a team of analysts who are looking in real time at data too. So we’re combining automation with humans to look at that data and then to be able to rapidly create content and creative that serves those customers’ desires.
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I’m a big proponent of AI. It is about propping up your team, not replacing your team. It’s about harmonizing with humans, because the real power comes from the art and the science.
We have a cohort of military customers, who are one of our best cohorts of customers, and they are one of our biggest groups of folks who are involved in our loyalty program as well. They not only enjoy the benefit of the loyalty program, but they actually enjoy the benefit of a 10% off discount every day on everything they purchase. We want to take our military customers on unique journeys along the way in their lifetime with Lowe’s, and that may mean moments like Memorial Day or Veterans Day, where we’re recognizing and honoring them, but it also might mean in the moments that matter most for them, like moving—where we’re talking to them and know that we have signals that [they’re] planning to move and how we can deliver the right offers when they’re moving, because a military family moves more often.
On the biggest challenges
Your biggest challenges often end up becoming your biggest KPIs. One of my biggest challenges is brand preference. When you think about brand preference, particularly in a duopoly of how perhaps you’re outsourced, there’s a proximity factor that comes into play, and then you also think about the fact that you are challenged with selling similar products in a similar environment and similar category to similar customers. The real question is: How do you stand out? How do you break category convention to stand out? But how do you stand out in a way that’s unique to home improvement, and that’s going to still deliver business results versus a flash in the pan, if you will? One of my biggest challenges is cracking the code on how to think about where Lowe’s uniquely plays in a brand preference race or duopoly. There are other duopolies out in the world that we look at: PepsiCo, Target, Walmart, etc.
Over the next couple of years, that’s my big remit, is to carve out our own space.