Long before the internet, with its online tutorials, The Home Depot was the place to go for people who wanted to get things done. For much of the company’s 40-plus-year history, its associates, in their reassuring orange aprons, established the store as a one-stop-shop for home improvement pros and DIY customers alike. Whether you were looking to fence a yard, fix a garage door, or renovate a bathroom, a trip to The Home Depot was about more than just finding the right tools for your project. It was about gaining the project knowledge that came along with them.
But for The Home Depot, the digital era posed a pivotal challenge: how to best translate its project-based expertise online.
Adolfo Villagomez, The Home Depot’s Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President – Online, knew the fix was buried somewhere in a data-science puzzle of epic proportions. And to solve that puzzle, he would need to find his own set of experts for guidance.
Navigating a sea of data
Back in 2016, The Home Depot’s end objective was already clear: a personalized, project-based experience for its online shoppers, patterning the kind of face-to-face customization that attracts consumers to its brick-and-mortar stores. In theory, the idea was straightforward. But for a business operating at the scale of The Home Depot, building and deploying such a solution was a challenging task.
First, there was the sheer scope of the company’s catalog to consider: an offering of some 2.5 million online products from thousands of vendors. Villagomez would need a system for tagging and linking these countless items so that the right product would be presented to the right buyer at the right time.
That led to the second complication: identifying what was the “right time” for each customer. If The Home Depot wanted to be able to personalize digital experiences for each customer’s intended project, it had to decide how to assign the right solution to each individual site visitor in real time. Villagomez knew he had two broad consumer categories to cater to: the professionals (contractors, plumbers, etc.) and the DIY customer. But those buckets were far too broad for true personalization.
The Home Depot knew the right tool to solve this challenge was data science.
“This is where the data science plays a very, very important role,” Villagomez said. “The spirit is, let's define the project that you're working on, and that's how we are going to communicate with you.”
A key part of The Home Depot’s solution was its work with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), an industry leader in the development and implementation of data modeling and agile data platforms for use cases just like Villagomez’s. The first step in the process was optimizing the use of The Home Depot’s customer trends to enhance the customer experience.
Once The Home Depot had consolidated its data streams, BCG partnered with internal analytics and technology teams to build an agile code base (adapted from BCG-developed intellectual property) that stitched that data together into consumer personas that stretched across digital and brick-and-mortar environments. Essentially, these personas could predict a specific shopper within a sea of signals to unify and personalize their brand experience across their purchasing journey.
Next up came determining what each individual consumer’s personalized experience should look like—and that was where advanced data models would lead the way. By matching each individual consumer to broader, project-based personas—like a kitchen remodel—those ML models could shape each consumer’s journey in a way that was both helpful and intuitive. Again, the BCG-designed code base automated most of the steps required for activation, surfacing content that met an individual’s need before they may even have realized they needed it. It was Villagomez’s vision: a digital orange apron, acting as an extension of the store associates that are a key component to providing the seamless customer experience The Home Depot is known for.
“Our goal in this work was always to help The Home Depot translate its longstanding project expertise to the realities of modern commerce,” said Mitch Colgan, Managing Director and Partner at BCG. “By combining BCG’s IP with The Home Depot’s resources and talent, we’ve been able to do exactly that.”
“It’s been a multi-year journey,” said Villagomez. “And BCG has been a great partner and has helped us move faster than we could have done on our own.”
Orange aprons for the digital age
The personalized shopping experience has acted as a sophisticated virtual orange apron for the company’s millions of online customers, resulting in an enhanced purchasing journey. But it’s also proven impactful for the brand’s many vendors.
The audience segmentation work that Villagomez’s team has done is immensely valuable to brands looking to reach specific consumer subsegments. Through The Home Depot’s retail media practice, Retail Media+, not only can the home improvement retailer suggest the right product for the right customer at the right time, but it can also suggest the right vendor for that product. Take a kitchen remodel, for example; the search engine recognizes the shopper needs a new faucet, and a vendor can purchase the right to display its particular faucet to that shopper right when they need it. This not only helps the vendor get their products in front of the right customers, but it also provides a seamless shopping experience, decreasing the time to find the right products to complete their projects.
Villagomez said The Home Depot’s personalized shopping experience is now “the best in the home improvement industry.” That’s been made possible through the brand’s dramatic growth in advanced data science. Its journey towards a more robust and efficient online presence has emphasized the integral part data science will play in the company’s future. Villagomez, for one, cannot wait to see how data-driven insights will continue to shape the company’s vital role in the home improvement space—and further improve upon the value it delivers to its customers.
“At the end of the day,” said Villagomez, “our customers are trying to solve a problem. They have a project in mind. And that’s what we are there to do for them: to help them complete that mission.”
This article was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Boston Consulting Group.
