Inside Home Depot’s marketing playbook: weather signals, influencers, and an app to drive bigger baskets

Molly Battin, Home Depot’s chief marketing officer, oversees far more than advertising. Product sits within her organization as a shared function across marketing and technology, giving her influence over the digital tools customers use to search for products, plan projects, and shop through the app. At Home Depot, the path to purchase often begins there—on a phone screen or in a search bar—long before a shopper reaches the aisle. Home improvement rarely starts with casual online browsing, Battin quips. More often, it begins with a broken faucet, a paint job already underway, or a project that has suddenly become urgent. Each task brings its own questions, creating a narrow window for Home Depot to surface the right information, recommend the right products, and capture the sale. The company’s structure, she says, brings marketing closer to the digital tools that interpret those signals and respond in real time, placing her team nearer to the moment a home project becomes a purchase. In many companies, product teams build the digital experience while marketers work to attract customers to it. At Home Depot, those functions operate side by side. Features such as Store Mode show shoppers the exact aisle and shelf section where an item is located, making the retailer’s vast warehouses easier to navigate, especially for less experienced homeowners who arrive with a project in mind but only a rough sense of what they need. In a business where customers often walk in with a repair, a renovation, or a half-formed idea, that kind of digital guidance can shape both the speed of the trip and the likelihood of a sale. “The merger of marketing and tech has never been greater,” Battin tells Fortune. Home Depot’s first-party data gives it unusual precision, she adds. The company uses weather and regional signals to determine which products to surface, which projects to emphasize, and how ads should look and read in different markets. That targeting is effective, Battin explains,