As one of the world’s largest retailers The Home Depot’s tagline, “how doers get more done,” signals the brand’s commitment to empower today’s home improvement customer while staying on pace with their evolving needs.
Brendan Baby, Director of Customer Strategy and Intelligence at The Home Depot, says the Home Depot’s Market Logic powered insights platform, “The Insight Depot” enabled his team to transform from a small department with a large backlog or requests, to a team with a seat at the board table, backed up by a one-stop-shop for insights to back them up.
More than just research—storytellers for the brand and strategic partners for the business
The Home Depot deployed their platform in 2015 to help shift their business from “the art of retail” to “the science of retail”, while equipping the insights team to serve as strategic partners in an advisory role. “We can’t just be another source of data,” Brendan said. “First and foremost, we’re all about enabling better, easier, faster decisions for the organization.”
With the help of The Insights Depot, Brendan said the insights function can now aggregate, synthesize, understand and craft stories from data and research. “We’re storytellers for the brand, storytellers for the customer within the brand, and strategic partners throughout the business,” he said.
Brendan said this approach has earned his team the right to sit at the board table for things they may not even have new research for. “A huge part of the reason we’re able to sit at the table is because we have the Insights Depot with about $45 million worth of insights on the platform and about 1,500 projects across all different business groups.”
The Insights Depot, a vital tool during a global crisis
With over $45 million in knowledge assets, the Insights Depot gave the organization the baseline knowledge it needed to rollout curbside delivery within three weeks of the 2020 global pandemic that forced lockdowns across North America.
“We took existing data and said, ‘Hey, we know customers feel this way about safety, they think this way about how we operate, and they think this way about a delivery,” Brendan said. And even as consumers’ behaviour changed from week to week depending on the news and the disease’s spread, Brendan and his team were prepared.
In parallel, the team leveraged the Insights Depot’s storytelling tools to serve stakeholders with a Covid-19 knowledge zone. This presented the big picture backed up by research trackers with weekly analytics on consumer comment trends and summaries from bi-weekly surveys among their customers.
A single virtual space for Home Depot to get to know their customer
The Insights Depot gives stakeholders a straightforward way to jump in and get to know their customer better, so they can make decisions faster. “All data is now democratized, accessible, and available to anybody in the company looking for information to make a decision,” Brendan said.
For example, the corporate employee who may not have the background knowledge to understand the Home Depot’s “Pro customer,” can easily access “Pro Ethnographies,” “Pro Research,” and even a “Pro Factbook.” And considering the “Pro” at Home Depot makes up about 5% of their customers, but from a revenue standpoint, closer to 50% of the business, the platform’s easy-to-access, targeted channels are key to giving employees the baseline knowledge they need to make marketing and sales decisions that win.
As a central place for all Home Depot’s insights assets, and with Brendan and his team’s expert application of the platform’s storytelling channels, the Insights Depot has seen a 21% year-over-year user growth since 2015, as it continues to support the insights team in their roles as strategic partners for the business.