Retail marketing lessons from Lowe’s CMO

Retailers these days seem to be up against a lot: rising costs, shifting consumer preferences, and dwindling loyalty are just the foremost among many concerns. But keeping consumer faith strong is arguably even more essential.

For Lowe’s CMO Jennifer Wilson, a lot of this comes down to putting together the perfect marketing strategy. Unfortunately, home improvement is not the easiest category to market. But Wilson, who has been with the retailer for nearly two decades, has it covered.

In a conversation at Shoptalk Fall in Chicago, the marketing veteran chatted with Retail Brew about Lowe’s primary marketing focus, shifting priorities, and new demographics.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Is there something you felt like was not working before you came on board as CMO, and are there things that you wanted to shake up?Sixty-five percent of consumers who are in the home improvement market—so they’re shopping for home improvement—told us in different ethnography studies that they were really not loyal to any one home improvement brand. We call these consumers “switchers.” The big challenge for us as a brand is how do you get switchers to take one more trip with you and spend one more trip with you? It became really a discussion about frequency and deepening a commitment, or a loyalty commitment to these consumers.

One of the things they shared with us when we unpacked some of this conversation was, “I want more value”….“Value is about price.”

But as we really unpack the conversation, it became about value beyond price, and that served as the inspiration for our new loyalty program, My Lowe’s Rewards, which really is a truly free loyalty program, and that’s hard to find in this industry, and we are the first in the home improvement space, in this big box space, to offer a loyalty program, both to the homeowner and to the professional customer. We have two big key constituents in terms of our consumer base. And within that free value proposition, we decided let’s make sure there’s the typical free standard shipping earn points and and get money back, but also free gifts, and drawing inspiration off of what we know consumers are really sparking to, specifically millennials…I would say that’s one of our big challenges, and one that we’re working really hard at, not just with a loyalty program.

Is Gen Z on your radar at all? Because when I think of home improvement and Gen Z, home improvement doesn’t inspire words like fun or sexy for me.

There’s a lot of fun and sexy as it relates to home improvement, but what I’ll say is Gen Zers are absolutely on our radar…A lot of what resonates in the beauty and fashion industry holds true for home improvement. Gen Zers are in love with trending products, and what we see take off with 2 million views or what goes viral are things like mini tool boxes.

Firstly, more than 30% of Gen Zers who are 25 and older already own a home. And secondly, in terms of their shopping behaviors, they are not like a boomer, looking at a long weekend, like a Memorial Day weekend, and saying, “Well, this is when I’m going to go tackle my home improvement project.” Instead, they’re scrolling through their feed. And so how do we show up with new and different products, as an example? Or, how do we show up with the help that they’re looking for? That’s really the challenge.

I would say that we hear both from millennials and Gen Zers that children are a way in and when we’re relevant to their kids, we’re a relevant brand to them. It’s important for us, as we offer free workshops for children as a part of being a My Lowe’s Rewards member—those sell out—once a month. So they’re very hard to get into and we’ve got to make those more accessible. I think that’s a big opportunity, the more that we can really connect with children. Live sports is another way that we’re doing that with some of our star athletes, and bringing those kids in to have experiences in stadiums and in game.