Building a Market Strategy: The Analytics Behind Where Two Home Improvement Giants Locate

Are you a Home Depot person or a Lowe’s person (or neither)? We looked at how these two home improvement giants compete on location strategy and which has a market planning advantage.

The Home Improvement sector is dominated by two companies — Home Depot and Lowe’s. Broadly speaking, companies in this industry can differentiate on location, price, and product selection.

We honed in specifically on location. We wondered — How do these two brands that sell effectively the same products at similar price points choose to locate? Further, what do their locations suggest about their location strategy and the competition in the industry?

Key Findings

• Home Depot has ~250 more stores than Lowe’s in the United States and has higher concentration in California, New York, and Georgia. Lowe’s has higher store concentration in North Carolina and Ohio.
• Home Depot’s location advantage is largely a result of building more density in a given market versus opening in different markets than Lowe’s.
• The brands have highly overlapping location strategies. The…