As retail media and personalization blur the line between selling and marketing, major brands are restructuring who owns the customer experience online.
Lowe's CMO Jen Wilson took on a new mandate in late 2026 that signals a fundamental shift in how major retailers think about marketing. Her purview expanded to include Lowes.com and the company's Marketplace, joining a portfolio that already covers retail media, loyalty programs, and personalization. The addition is not a promotion shuffle. It reflects a hard truth: in modern commerce, the lines between selling and marketing have dissolved.
Traditionally, a CMO manages the ads, emails, and brand campaigns that drive traffic. A head of e-commerce or retail runs the storefronts and inventory. The two rarely talk. But when a retailer also runs a marketplace where thousands of vendors sell, and sells ads to those vendors on top of it, that old split breaks down. Personalization algorithms decide what products a customer sees. Retail media ads from competitors sit inches from your own inventory. Loyalty points stack differently depending on channel. None of those decisions are purely marketing or purely commerce anymore. They are commerce.
Lowe's move puts the entire digital customer journey under one owner. That means one person or team makes sure the ads, the storefronts, the marketplace, and the loyalty rewards all point the same way. No turf wars. No misaligned incentives. No customer experience fractured because marketing wanted one thing and e-commerce wanted another.
If you are selling through your own website or a third-party marketplace, Lowe's reorganization is a mirror held up to your own operation. The question is not whether you have a CMO or a VP of E-commerce. The question is: who owns the whole thing? Who makes sure your checkout page, your email, your social ads, and your loyalty mechanics all reinforce each other instead of competing?
Most small and medium businesses answer no to all three. The result is leakage. A customer sees an ad, lands on a confusing product page, abandons the cart, gets no follow-up email, and never returns. Each function (ads, site, email, loyalty) is optimized in isolation. None of them are optimized for revenue.
Lowe's is not a startup. It is not an experiment. When a Fortune 500 retailer restructures to put commerce under marketing, it is betting that the outcome (higher customer lifetime value, faster repeat purchase, better loyalty stickiness) justifies the reorganization. The company would not do it otherwise.
The lesson for owners: if Lowe's found unified ownership of the digital customer journey valuable enough to reorganize around it, your shop probably needs the same alignment. Not the same org chart, your scale and structure are different. But the same principle: whoever drives the customer acquisition also needs to see (and influence) the customer retention and repeat purchase. Otherwise, you are burning cash to bring customers to a broken experience.
The addition of Lowes.com and Marketplace to a purview that includes retail media, loyalty and personalization speaks to the evolution of the marketer role.
Marketing Dive, September 2026
Audit your own operations. Map every place a customer can touch your brand (paid ads, email, your website, marketplace accounts, loyalty programs, social media). Then ask: does one person or team see all of that data? Can they change things if one channel underperforms? Or are these functions so separated that no one is accountable for the whole funnel?
You may not be able to reorganize your staff tomorrow. But you can start acting like your commerce and marketing are one problem. Weekly sync meetings between teams. Shared KPIs (not siloed ones). One dashboard that shows traffic, conversion, retention, and loyalty all in one place. That is how Lowe's thinks now. It is also how you should think.
How WebKing runs this
We help retailers connect their storefronts, loyalty programs, and vendor ecosystems so every touchpoint reinforces the brand and moves the customer closer to sale. When those pieces report to one strategy, not siloed departments, the math works better.
Because the customer journey online is now one experience. Retail media advertising, product personalization, checkout, and marketplace trust all feed into whether someone buys. When those functions report to different leaders, they pull in different directions. Lowe's decision shows that ownership matters more than titles.
If you're selling through your own site or a marketplace, yes. The same person or team should think about both discovery (marketing) and conversion (commerce) as one problem, not two. Your loyalty program, email, and product pages should reinforce each other, not compete for budget or attention.
Retail media is ads your suppliers or competitors buy on your platform to reach your customers. If it's not coordinated with your marketplace and storefronts, you end up promoting competing products or cluttering the experience. One owner makes sure the ads and the products work together.
The principle is: whoever controls the customer experience should own all the levers that shape it. For a small business, that might be the owner or a single marketing hire. The point is not to let checkout, email, and ads drift into separate pockets where nobody connects the dots.
Sources
The Lab is original analysis by WebKing. We summarize and interpret developments from the sources above for industrial, commercial, and small business owners. Figures are reported as published by their sources.
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