Tamika Hewlett, Director, Audience Marketing, The Home Depot 

All eyes on Tamika Hewlett, the Director of Audience Marketing at The Home Depot. She has been inducted into the 2024 Marketers To Watch Series, in partnership with The Wall Street Journal, for her innovative work and leadership.

Having spent the majority of her career in marketing roles across B2C and B2B organizations spanning Retail, Tech/SaaS, Manufacturing, and Financial Services, she has a well-rounded approach that allows her to excel in building authentic relationships with The Home Depot’s Consumer Audiences.   Her experiences have given her a keen ability to understand consumer behavior, motivations, and purchase intent to deliver helpful experiences that drive engagement and increase customer loyalty. 

Are you curious about the leader behind The Home Depot’s Marketing, empowering customers to take on home improvement with confidence? Keep reading to learn Tamika’s perspectives on the future of marketing, the innovative work she’s been leading, her best career advice, and more.

Future of Marketing

Q: What’s one thing coming down the marketing pike you are most excited about?

I am open to the potential of AI and how it could revolutionize marketing by enhancing how we engage with customers, allowing us to deliver more personalized touchpoints, and optimizing how we work.  It will free us up to focus on new business challenges, allowing marketers to claim a bigger seat at the table. Increasingly, we see that our ability to deliver robust marketing solutions relies on cross-functional support in areas such as Supply Chain, IT, Customer Care, and others outside the core marketing function.

I encourage other marketing leaders to focus on what it can unlock for you and your teams—such as increasing our ability to drive more innovation and create new marketing capabilities, which I find to be very exciting.  

Q: What widely accepted “marketing truth” do you wish the industry would evolve? 

The balance of Brand vs. Performance marketing and the art and science behind how one best deploys marketing investments against each, continues to be a challenge that most marketers are facing.  Brand, however, can drive performance.   Within my team, we are executing campaigns that integrate brand advertising for the purposes of helping to establish deeper connections to our audiences, growing our customer base, and driving overall engagement, all of which are performance-driven activities. 

For us, we start by defining the audience or consumer type and the outcome we are looking to achieve by targeting them and then building the right channel mix to deliver on our objectives. We should not exclusively look at performance through the lens of a tactic but consider where the channel sits in the funnel.   

Q: What’s a prediction you have for Audience Marketing over the next few years?

First-party data and owned channels must work harder than ever due to the impending changes to third-party cookies and the impact of important signals that are widely used in digital advertising.  For marketers, it is about increasing content creation, ensuring its effectiveness, and making it readily available on all properties (web, mobile, digital, etc.) so that your audiences can engage on their terms when they interact with your brand ecosystem.  

Audience targeting will be less anchored on what we know about past behavior but more about what someone is actively doing or engaging in, and leveraging contextual advertising to serve them up the most relevant information on the appropriate platforms.   This will also require that we get more surgical in understanding the consumers’ mindsets and identities.

What they value, what they are into, and how they want to show up in the world are shaped by external and internal influences that impact how we execute our marketing efforts.   

Audience Marketing at The Home Depot

Q: What’s something exciting you’re currently working on at The Home Depot?  

I am really excited about our work to create home project enthusiasts with Millennials and Gen Z consumers.   Millennials are the largest segment of homeowners in the United States. They hold a large share of the overall national income, thus making them an important consumer for retailers.   Whether it is moving into that first apartment, designing new spaces in your house, creating a backyard that will be the envy of your neighbors, or simply working on a fun weekend project, The Home Depot is here to help our customers tackle their unique home improvement-related needs.   

Leadership and Career Advice

Q: What leadership muscle is most important for marketers to exercise?

Creating a philosophy of calculated risk-taking is an important trait for any leader.  Doing so will empower teams to lean into innovation and creativity.   For my teams, we follow an 80/20  or 90/10 approach.   If 80% of what we do is focused on Business as Usual (BAU) work, the remaining 20% should be reserved for new and different strategies or white space opportunities. 

Q: What’s the most game-changing career advice you‘ve received?

Anything can be done, but it is nearly impossible to do everything effectively at once, especially in a world with limited resources, budget, and time—a story that most of us can surely relate to!  Being focused and intentional has been an invaluable piece of advice that I have received. This does not mean that there will not be fires to chase and conflicting priorities to sift through, but being clear on the north star—and establishing this for your team—ensures that you can make the biggest impact against the most important priorities.  

---

Marketers to Watch is a recognition series to spotlight highly innovative and forward-thinking marketing leaders in the community. If you have someone you’d like to nominate for the series, apply here.