The marketing team at Lowe’s Home Improvement is hoping to give its bottom line an assist with an elevated chief marketing officer, a new agency partner and a fresh campaign featuring the king of assists—Lionel Messi—to kick off the summer.
The brand promoted Jennifer Wilson from senior vice president, enterprise brand and marketing, to senior vp, CMO. The 15-year veteran of the brand has toggled between merchandising and marketing throughout her time at Lowe’s, and she is the latest in the next generation of CMOs who have tapped into a different array of skills to succeed in the position.
Following the departure of CMO Marisa Thalberg in September 2022, Lowe’s rethought where the CMO position sits within the organization, moving marketing under merchandising, which is led by Bill Boltz, executive vp of merchandising. With Wilson’s promotion, marketing will remain under merchandising.
It comes at a time when the home improvement category is coming down off of pandemic highs, and Lowe’s has seen revenues decline a hair faster than main rival Home Depot—Lowe’s revenue declined 11% from 2022 to 2023, while Home Depot’s dropped just 3%.
Aside from elevating Wilson, Lowe’s also made changes with its agency partners, debuting its first work from Dentsu Creative as its lead creative shop. The brand also switched Publicis media agencies, quietly swapping out Starcom for Spark Foundry.
With new agency partners in place, Wilson and her team are pushing three main priorities. The first is to usher in new messaging that the brand has the most helpful employees in home improvement. Wilson also wants to drive more loyalty, citing that 65% of shoppers are switching back and forth between home improvement retailers. She plans to capitalize on the opportunity to have “stickier” relationships with those so-called switchers. Finally, there’s the modernization of the marketing department that starts with customer data and artificial intelligence but ends with a massive opportunity to mature its retail media network to snag brand dollars away from more general retailers like Amazon, Target and Walmart.
Due to Wilson’s merchandising background, Lowe’s is expanding what rolls up under Wilson compared to when Thalberg previously held the position. The brand is creating a customer experience integration team to serve its growing media network. They will be tasked with better understanding the end-to-end consumer journey, Wilson told ADWEEK. To support its loyalty program, the brand also established a customer marketing team. Both teams will be heavily data-focused and responsible for storytelling across the company.
“We want to really push the brand and start defying category convention,” Wilson said, adding that as a marketing team, they have to answer this question: “When you are a part of a duopoly and you sell the same products in the same warehouse to effectively the same consumer set, how do you stand out? And how are you different?”
KPIs for success