Consumer Insights for Home Improvement Retailers - Lowes & Home Depot | Episode 05

In this episode of Consumer Central, Toph analyzes the marketing content for two titans of the home improvement retail space - Lowes and Home Depot.

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Transcript:

Hello, my name is Toph. Welcome back to Consumer Central where we help businesses and marketers eliminate blind spots by revealing more of the customer journey than they could ever see before.

Today we thought we would share something interesting - two titans going head to head. Two awesome companies - Home Depot and Lowes.

These two absolutely dominate market share and are going head to head, with Menards being a distant second, or I guess third, if you want to call it that.

So again, we are focusing on consumer behavior insights. If you think about the complexity of a business like Home Depot or Lowes, they sell many, many different types of products in different categories. They have services and many other things. So we just picked a couple quick ones - refrigerators and lawn mowers - because these are some leading sellers for them. Today, we thought we would focus specifically on refrigerators.

So again, let's say I'm working at Home Depot. I come in here and I see I am neck-and-neck, head-to-head, with Lowes and actually just a tick behind them.

When it comes to refrigerators, how do I take back that market share? That's probably my mindset if I'm Home Depot. If I'm working at Menards, I should be taking a real strong look at how we're going to gain market share against the two titans.

Let's start out by looking at the most powerful questions that people are asking. I am just behind Lowes in terms of market share and the strategies that Lowes is deploying versus my team. So we thought it would be interesting to go in here and see what it looks like when you have two titans going head-to-head. So check this out.

We have Home Depot and Lowes right here. And all of this green means, for the most powerful 500 things out of the top 2,000, they are going head to head, ranked on the first page, almost arm-in-arm down this entire list.

Lowes is holding a little bit of an edge in some places and Home Depot is holding a little bit of an edge in other places. What we thought was interesting, if you get down in here to around 450 to 500 of the most powerful things, we actually do see Home Depot edging out Lowes on some of these phrases around refrigerators. We won't go into them in detail, but I will point out two quick things.

Number one, if I'm on the flip side of the coin, if I'm Menards, I would want to be leveraging this data immediately to learn how to take market share, or how to gain market share. There is lots of opportunity here to gain market share. When it comes to refrigerators and we've seen similar results in other product lines all of these folks carry when it comes to Menards opportunity.

So how would Home Depot start to take the lead away from Lowes? Well, they would focus on the awareness, consideration, and decision mode - that customer journey. How can they start to eke away market share from Lowes and take that ultimate edge? What we thought was interesting is that when it comes to search related keywords, without question, in awareness mode, Home Depot should focus on troubleshooting in services. This is by far what people are thinking about the most. If you look at refrigerators as a whole, it really comes down to reliability, style, and size. That's what everybody is concerned about. 

And with that reliability piece of it, it is all about troubleshooting and service when it comes to keywords and paid search if you go into questions.

But by really focusing the marketing strategy for organic SEO and paid search, and really bucketing these things, and focusing on what happens in the awareness phase of the customer journey, what happens in the consideration portion of the customer journey, and what happens in the decision mode in that customer journey is where someone will definitely win this war.

So that's all for the moment with Home Depot and Lowes as they go head-to-head as two titans in the home space. Until next time, we look forward to seeing you in consumer Central. Thank you very much. Have a great day.