Mediaboss Marketing

Spring is one Lowes busiest seasons. Have you had to adjust your messaging at all to account for the current situation?

Its been a real gift to have such strong relationships and connections within the CMO community. I take heart in the fact that the instincts that I brought to how to approach this wound up being pretty consistent with how others thought about their own businesses. Theres that first initial phase of assessing and then triaging your existing work. Spring is an incredibly important time for us as a retailer, but then you have to go back through all the work that was done prior to this and look at it through a completely new lens of appropriateness, relevancy and how do you tailor the message. And these phases are shortwere talking days, not weeks.

Then its how to bring in the new ways of communicating that feel authentic but right for this drastically altered world. Its profoundI was attracted to come work for this leading home improvement retailer and here I am getting to know and getting to steward this brand at a time when literally home has never been more deeply important to us than it is today.

This is a time where we as marketers need to be agile and adaptive and not necessarily think that were planting flags, but how to be in the now. How do you show a sense of being able to be really connected to how people are thinking, feeling and what they genuinely need and where your brand most authentically and realistically lines up to that? In our case, being a retailer that is essential because we support people in their homes is an unbelievable realization and responsibility. It became much less about being very commercial and promotional in our messaging and a lot more about how do we really express the heart of this brand and do it in a way that is also humble, participatory and true to who we are.

The Build Thanks campaign was starting to see this emergence of people wanting to share their gratitude and also connect to the outside world. It was a DIY project, and were all about DIY and we thought we could help perpetuate that and ourselves with #BuildThanks. We were really specific, we were not asking them to buy anything, but to use what you already have at home. This company is values-driven and has this greater heart, but this story hasnt been well told, and it became a moment of opportunity. The way were showing up now for people is not COVID-basedthis is not COVID advertising, this is advertising about who Lowes is as a brand. This is what weve always done, like with Hurricane Sandy. Its a really nice moment to share that story and reflect on it.

Marvin Ellison, our CEO, has made multiple announcements on that, from deciding to close our stores on Easter Sunday and give all our associates a paid day off, to increasing their wages for the month of April. In stores, theres all sorts of social distancing signage, plexiglass dividers for those working the registers, and we have social distancing ambassadors who man our garden centers. Its a tricky time in general. Being open is a gift in terms of being able to be there, to address the many needs consumers have to run their homes safely and give them projects to do that occupy them, but being open is not without its challenges.

If theres one thing weve all learned from this experience, its really tested our ability to live in the absence of having plans that are as concrete as we might like them to be. There are so many things that are unknown right now, so you plan and then create contingencies and alternatives. You try to be really adaptive. If we all just reflect on how much things have changed in the past month, its shattering. Our intention will be to continue to invest and to create a relationship with consumers and let them know that we have the things they need.

Its still early enough in my tenure that its a lot about optimizing in the channels that we play versus making gigantic shifts. I believe we are a mass brand that deserves a place to tell stories in broadcast media. This has been a good time for that as viewership has been quite high, relative to previous months and years, because people are at home. You go from that to how we invest in paid search and everything in between. We think audio is also an important medium. And our social channels we have a lot of opportunity to do more with them were starting to see how we parse the storytelling differently. One of the things I enjoy about being a large brand is it gives you a sandbox of different channels and different ways of figuring out how to connect and communicate and right now theres no pulling back on any of that.

Weve seen people really dive into the small home improvement projects that maybe theyd put off because they have the time at home now. Theres something wonderfully constructive about putting your energies into them. Weve seen [buying of] products that speak to those types of projects and activities that are in demand and then of course all of the essentials that are core to what we do as a home improvement retailer that enable people to fix things that are broken, keep their homes running smoothly and replace an appliance that is on the fritz. Its a combination of that.

Read the rest here:
Lowe's new CMO on pandemic marketing in the age of social distancing - AdAge.com