After nine years with paint brand Behr, Andy Lopez was recently appointed global chief marketing officer of the brand – the youngest person to hold the title in the company’s history.
His role is to help the company, which has been around for almost 80 years and has been the exclusive paint brand of Home Depot since the retail chain opened in 1979, reach DIY consumers and professionals in new and innovative ways.
One of the biggest challenges that people face when shopping for paint is color paralysis, says Lopez.
“Choosing a color and feeling confident in color is one of the hardest parts of the journey,” he explains. “People either love it or they hate it. And when we really dove into why people dislike the color processes and it really comes down to feeling confident about that one color. They could have a bunch of colors they’re getting excited about, but when it’s time to make that decision about that one color, that’s when they start to pull back.”
So they created ChatHUE an AI-powered color selection agent launched in partnership with Google Cloud using Gemini so help users find matching shades, visualize colors in uploaded room photos in order to eliminate decision fatigue.
“The sole purpose when we launched ChatHUE was to get people to feel confident as they narrowed down color throughout the process,” says Lopez.
Brand Innovators caught up with Lopez to talk about the brand’s mission, their enduring partnership with Home Depot and the growth of DIY home renovation content. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you talk about what the brand’s mission and how that shows up in your creative?
Our goal is to make it as easy and seamless for pros or DIYers to find the tools and products they need to take on a project. We look at our positioning as it relates to new product innovation, whether it’s to save time or money or whether it’s to do more with one product than just a single use. It’s really about putting the consumer first as we’re thinking about innovation within our product assortment.
From a campaign standpoint, we really position ourselves as this DIY coach for the DIY audiences. We promote the end-to-end experience and what we are doing to help you get from before to after faster, whether that’s providing you the right digital experience, the right inspiration, the right confidence as you’re choosing a color all the way through celebrating whatever the end result looks like. We are really championing you throughout the entire process. From a pro perspective, we position Home Depot feel as a one-stop shop for pros, whether that’s within our product assortment or services like delivery or customer care to the pro to help them on product tips and tricks, depending on what their project is.
Can you talk about the Home Depot partnership?
They’re an extension of our team and we’re an extension of their team across multiple facets of the business, whether that’s marketing or merchandising. We partner with them in all different areas in order to make sure that we collectively are driving the best experience for the segments that we’re going after. We’re so aligned on how we want to do it because of the exclusiveness in the relationship. We’re trying to drive traffic into Home Depot. We’re trying to drive more paint volume, and that’s what they’re trying to do as well. Those ambitions align really nicely as far as what we’re trying to achieve together and the segments that we’re going after to do that. That’s where some of the magic happens, whether it’s partnering on a big sports partnership like FIFA or really aligning ourselves on growing the different segments, whether that’s the Millennial, Gen Z or the Hispanic audience across both pro and DIY. There’s a lot of ways that we are looking at the opportunities together in order to drive success and results.
How are you getting your message to somebody who’s new to the DIY space? Are you working with creators and influencers?
There are so many different ways that we are going after the DIY audience. The term DIY has evolved so much over the last couple of decades, especially, in the last five to six years after COVID. Everyone was taking on new types of DIY projects. It’s really making sure that no matter where someone is and where they’re coming into the process that we are there. Whether they are considering DIY picking out the color or doing the entire project themselves, we just want to make sure that we’re assisting them throughout that process. We really go after the different parts of the journey people are taking, whether that’s just inspiring them to take on a project, whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring a pro, the idea is to inspire them on what a room transformation can do. Creators are amazing to work with, especially within the DIY space, their content is so authentic to their channel. We love how they get so creative in their expression and how they use our brand as a tool to complete their vision. When other people see that, they get inspired. We love working with creators in that aspect.
Can you talk about once you are encouraging people to share their finished renovations on social to drive inspiration?
We have had some sweepstakes throughout the year to generate some DIY projects and celebrate that content to encourage people to take on projects and showing how it can transform your space. We have a huge push on user-generated content. The creativity when it comes to color and transforming spaces and even DIY hacks, has seen a huge uplift in our user-generated content is to see how are people hacking some of the pain points of the process, which is a lot of like the prep and how you’re able to tackle that project. We want to make sure that we can use our platform to share not only what we’re trying to do from a brand perspective to help them, but what are just any DIYer that’s, sharing their content and tagging us showing either DIY hacks or their room transformation, being able to get that message out there too. We love our community, we built a huge presence on social media. We’re constantly engaging with the people that are engaging with our content.
We recently did a DIY hotline, which was a big social content creator campaign to answer questions for people. We partnered with a few different influencers of all different facets, not just DIY influencers, but designers and financial and DIYers as well. This combination of diverse creators that any question that people had, whether it was, how much would it cost to paint my room? How many gallons would I need for this type of project? What’s the best sheen to use if I’m painting a bathroom? We just wanted to create this open forum to be able to answer as many questions as possible.
How do you approach media in an always-on world?
The media landscape has continued to evolve and continue to change significantly. We try to take a really balanced approach. We want to make sure that we are motivating at the highest funnel. We have a play within linear TV and the connected TV landscape. This upper funnel strategy is to bring people in and get them excited. It’s not just one-size-fits-all. TV is not the only upper funnel now. Social is upper funnel. As we think about our partnership with Orange Apron Media and the first-party data they have, there are opportunities that they have on homedepot.com or within their platforms as well. We really look at how can we make sure we’re getting the right message at the right time, within the right channel and creating content that’s very specific to that channel in order to understand the performance and optimize it super quickly to understand what’s working, what’s not working and putting the right dollars and the right resources behind what we feel like is going to drive the biggest impact.
Can you talk about how your past experiences at the brand and then also on the agency side are helping your perspective that you have today.
I’ve been with Behr for a little over nine years. Before that I was on the agency side. The agency provided the best foundation as far as getting such a great perspective on different things, a deep dive really within the impact that marketing can make. And then also being able to diversify my experience on a lot of different industries and brands and different approaches on how you commercialize and how you go to market as a brand. That foundation really helped build the marketer that I am today. I worked across a lot of different functions within our brands, which has really helped, again, shape me to help lead the marketing organization. I don’t think I would change anything about the trajectory or the path that I took in order to get here.the brand itself is such an amazing brand. We have such an amazing culture here within our organization. And it’s just such an exciting opportunity, as you think about color and just the possibilities and being able to really help people, again, whether that’s the pro in their job and making them, more, more successful within their job or a DIY and just the feeling that you get of being able to tackle a project and then encouraging them to tackle even more projects.
What are you working on heading into the back half of the year?
We launched ChatHUE last October and we’ve been making some optimizations to it based on consumer feedback. When we initially launched it, it was really just to bring whoever was using it closer to that confidence level of what color they want from an interior perspective. We saw through our feedback that visualization was so important. Not only did they want to narrow in based through our color expertise, but they wanted to be able to visualize it in their room.
A few months ago, we launched the visualization piece of it, then listened to consumer feedback on what they wanted based on their engagement with the tool. We saw 15% increase in our customer satisfaction. We’re doing more of that now with product support and exterior colors. We have a full roadmap based on everyday usage. We’re continuing to figure out how to solve the biggest pain point when it comes to painting, which is color. Additionally, we just launched a new website, built more as an ecommerce site that leans into being a color destination, because our data found people were looking for color help and inspiration. We want to be the brand to deliver that experience.
