Analysis Of Home Depot

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One of Home Depot’s largest marketing problems through the course of their industry life-cycle is their differentiation strategy from their competitors. In a mature life-cycle, it’s hard for companies to be innovative. The issues though are that Home Depot has been following Lowe’s lead in change and innovation, but what Home Depot claims as their differentiation strategy isn’t really that different from their largest competitor, Home Depot’s CEO from 2000-2007, the slumping of the housing market, homogenous products, and their high market concentration.
Home Depot is one of the biggest players in the home improvement market. Lowe’s follows right behind them. Other competitors are Wal-Mart, True Value Hardware, Ace Hardware, and Menard’s. We will focus more on the differences between Home Depot and Lowe’s, because they are the two largest within the home improvement industry.
The characteristics that differentiates Lowe’s from Home Depot is their customer service, store appearance, and store layout. Lowe’s started in the 90’s to differentiate itself from Home Depot, to attract more of the D-I-Y customers, because they were worried about losing market share. Lowe’s is more attractive to the women consumer base, because there are a lot more home décor products that are appealing (Competition Leaves…).
Home Depot and Lowe’s have different customer bases. While Lowe’s adheres to the needs of the majority women, Home Depot has a mixture of customers. The loyal consumer base does find a difference between the two stores, but no one is able to tell which company is better (Competition Leaves…). The other thing about Lowe’s customers is that they are a lot more loyal to their store than Home Depot’s customers, especially when it comes to ...

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...umer, Home Depot needs to focus on their employees, because the results of focusing on them will in turn relay good results for the consumers. When Home Depot is able to retain their reliable employees who are trained and educated about Home Depot and their products, then the employees will be able to relay the knowledge to their consumers.
(Talking about the Housing Market)
In the year 2014, Home Depot has taken the opportunity to open an online distribution center. They’ve always followed a traditional retail model by adding stores in areas where they thought they could make profit, but the problem was that in an over saturated market, they started to cannibalize their profits by having many stores in the same area. Home Depot has found one way to differentiate itself, by fitting the changing shopping behavior of Americans and not lose out on their profits (WSJ).

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