January 22, 2019
Lowe’s has reached a massive deal with the National Football League that makes it the league’s official home-improvement retail sponsor.
The exclusive multiyear partnership will give Lowe’s branding rights and marketing opportunities at key events including the Super Bowl, the NFL draft, and the NFL combine, Lowe’s announced Tuesday. Financial details of the partnership were not disclosed.
The deal could give Lowe’s major marketing leverage over its biggest home-improvement competitor, Home Depot.
“This was a very big strategic move for us” says Jocelyn Wong, chief marketing officer at Lowe’s.
In tandem with the partnership, Lowe’s is kicking off a new marketing campaign designed to attract new customers. The campaign specifically targets “heavy do-it-yourselfers” — those customers who take on complicated and highly technical projects — and home-improvement professionals like contractors.
“As we were looking at 2019 and beyond marketing plans we realized we had an opportunity to expand our customer base,” Wong said.
“We do really well with light-DIY customers and want to expand with heavier-DIY customers.”
This strategy appears to be a direct appeal to Home Depot’s customer base. Home-improvement professionals tend to prefer shopping at Home Depot over Lowe’s, according to research by Wedbush Securities.
Professional contracts account for 20% to 25% of sales at Lowe’s and 45% of sales at Home Depot, Wedbush Securities’ Seth Basham told Business Insider’s Áine Cain.
The tagline of the new campaign, “Do It Right,” is designed to appeal to customers who take pride in their home-improvement projects and “believe anything worth doing is worth doing right,” Wong said.
To reach this customer, the new ads will take on a “grittier” and more “authentic” tone than the company’s past campaigns, which were more “whimsical” in nature, Wong said.
“We want Lowe’s to be the place for those people who are going to go the extra mile to do it right,” she said.
This article originally appeared on BusinessInsider.com.
