Editor’s Note: Home improvement retail chain Lowe’s is pushing a large agenda forward. The retailer kicked off its “We’re Here to Help” campaign platform last month, promoting the retailer’s commitment to community revitalization; it plans to launch a marketplace to expand its assortment; plus, it debuted a creator network to improve its influencer measurement. Jennifer Wilson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer sat down with Multichannel Marketer’s sister Chief Marketer to talk more about the retailer’s strategy. Below is an excerpt from the piece; for the full article, head to Chief Marketer.
Chief Marketer: Why is this the right time for Lowe’s to launch a creator network? It’s obviously a large project that’s been a long-time coming.
Jennifer Wilson: A couple things. One, to your point, we had been beta testing this for well over a year, which is how we’ve accelerated into the 17,000 creators that are already in our community. And that was in an effort to learn the affiliate side of the world to understand from creators, whether they’re micro-creators or some bigger, mid-size creators, what tools and analytics they needed from us to be able to both operate from a business perspective but also be their authentic selves and create the creative that was most meaningful to them. So we used that as a learning ramp.
The “why now” is twofold. Creators drive a tremendous amount of online revenue. And we as an industry in the CMO/C-Suite are looking at how we can get better at measuring the impact of influencers who influence the purchase beyond just dotcom. Because ultimately I want measurement attribution to be able to capture what’s happening in stores as well. And we’re moving to that. We know as a marketing community that this is a real big flywheel for dotcom business. Online growth is one of our six strategic pillars of the company, of our “total home” strategy.
We are starting a marketplace as well so that we can expand our online presence and get into more offerings and assortment across the total home. So when we’re in parallel launching the marketplace, and know strategically we need to deliver and outpace a standard CAGR and online growth, this felt like the right time. In addition to that, we know we need to grow with younger audiences. Growing with millennials and Gen Zers and frankly even Gen Alpha has become a significant part of our strategy at Lowe’s.
CM: You’ve partnered with MrBeast at the launch, who is hugely influential.
JW: We knew that if we could pull MrBeast into the creator network, it could both appeal to those younger audiences, but also just spark some excitement with other creators, whether big or small. If the world’s largest creator is joining the Lowe’s network, then why shouldn’t I? And what we also like about MrBeast is that he is philanthropic. We share values in the sense of his give-back to communities. But we could also be his official build partner of the season two of “Beast Games,” and our red vest associates are literally on site there helping to build the city. We’ve got great footage of that. So that became a really authentic connection. We paired the two together: a strategic business decision as well as a way to accelerate what we’ve been beta testing.
CM: What’s the marketplace strategy?
JW: We recently announced at our annual investor conference that we would be launching our marketplace. We also announced a partnership with Mirakl where we’ve got our first several marketplace providers live out on Lowes.com. The ambition is to be able to offer consumers end-to-end needs for anything they need for their home. And while we have a solid assortment today of almost two million items, from couches to side tables and rugs and plants, et cetera, that you would want in your home, we want that assortment to expand. Because we know, particularly for millennial homeowners, they can’t get enough of choice. They just want to be able to find anything and everything that fits their style. And we believe that marketplace will be able to accelerate and advance our broad assortment while bringing great value to our customers.
For the full piece, head to Chief Marketer.
Network
