Home Depot Chairman, President, and CEO Craig Menear has held the top spot in the company for less than a year, but he knows that the company must evolve its strategic framework to meet changing consumer needs and to provide better customer engagement.
Menear spoke about this strategic framework at the Sept. 10 Goldman Sachs 22nd Annual Global Retailing Conference.
“Important to know that our strategic framework that we have been operating from for the last several years is still intact,” Menear said, according to Seeking Alpha. “And the reason that’s intact is because it’s founded from what our customers and our shareholders expect from the Home Depot. So as we look at that strategic framework, it does need to evolve. So for us to continue to focus on our three-legged stool, first leg being driving excellent customer service, we need to look at how that evolves as the customer changes and how we begin to connect labor with the changing customer needs as we go forward.”
The second leg of Home Depot’s strategy is all about driving product authority in the home improvement space.
“There we have to continue to leverage the tools that we have built to connect local needs of the customers to our assortments,” Menear explained. “That becomes really important if you think about the digital impact in the space as well. Then we are embarking upon an end-to-end thought process as it relates to driving product authority. And this is a different approach for us from where we have been for the past eight years, but really thinking from supplier all the way through customer purchase, including aftercare. And, in large part, what we have had to do over the last eight years is fix a bunch of things in our business that were done within functional silos. So for example, the store operations teams need to go out and fix service. Merchandising need to fix the competitive position of the company in the marketplace. Supply chain needed to go build a new supply chain for the Home Depot. So for the past eight years, that’s the hard work that we have been doing, mainly within functional silos.”
Menear said this “end-to-end thought process” is “about how do we actually begin to think about the customer experiences that we are creating and how does each area of the business then impact that experience. So it’s a much more cross-functional approach and a much more collaborative approach back-stream into our vendor community as well.”
Home Depot’s third strategic leg revolves around productivity and efficiency, and providing a memorable customer experience in any channel the customer chooses.
“That’s played well for us at the Home Depot and we need to continue to focus on those opportunities as we look forward, as well as driving our capital allocation to make sure that we are connecting our stores to our web and our web to our stores,” Menear explained.