Lowe’s Names a New CMO and Gives an Inside Look at Its First Work With Dentsu Creative

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

Wilson outlined four key performance indicators the brand will be most focused on:

1. Increasing brand preference drives traffic to stores.

2. Measuring traffic to stores is “exponentially critical.”

3. Value perception scores versus her competitive set for both pros and homeowners.

4. Loyalty to Lowe’s. She calls it a “one more trip mentality” to get consumers to choose Lowe’s a little more often instead of switching back and forth.

Breaking down the brief

Lowe’s ran its creative review in-house instead of using a consultant because Wilson said the brand has “a very sizable sourcing group.”

The company ultimately picked Dentsu Creative after issuing a brief that challenged the competing agencies to defy category conventions, while also staying true to the home improvement sector. Dentsu Creative recognized that the pieces were in place already with the brand’s “Lowe’s Knows” campaign last year. That platform gave Lowe’s a chance to be more consistent with its creative output instead of relying on the peaks and valleys of certain events like holidays and the spring lawn and garden rush.

“We were looking for a partner that didn’t approach creative for creative sake,” Wilson said. “We were looking for a partner that strategically could leverage creativity to drive business results.”

The brand believes its red vest associates are differentiators, so it wanted to use them to “show that we really understand people better, so we can help them better,” said Laurel Flatt, chief client officer, Dentsu Creative U.S.

With 300,000 RVAs, showing them off in its marketing also helps fend off purely digital competitors like Amazon, where expert help is nonexistent.

The brand looked at Lionel Messi as a potential ambassador, but it needed an idea that lent itself to more than just Messi kicking a soccer ball around for the sake of kicking a soccer ball. The agency-client team viewed Messi—who has more assists on goals than any soccer player in the world—as the perfect way to “bring to life this idea of assisting people, whether it’s on the field, in our communities or in our aisles,” Wilson said. “That was really the strategic umbrella behind this campaign.”

Messi also opens the brand up to reach new groups of consumers. “When we put our existing customer base on top of who’s watching live sports and soccer, it’s a whole net new audience that we’re talking to,” Wilson said.