Behr CMO Lopez Expands Mandate Beyond Marketing to Product

Andy Lopez took over as Chief Marketing Officer of Behr Paint Company last month, a role that now includes product strategy and innovation alongside the usual marketing oversight. The expansion reflects a push to unify the consumer experience across Behr's digital tools and its retail presence at Home Depot.

In the weeks since his promotion, Behr relaunched its website, shifting it from an ecommerce shop into what Lopez calls a "color destination." The company also continues to build out ChatHUE, an AI color tool developed with Google Cloud. Both moves target a single pain point: picking a color is the hardest part of any paint project.

"Color at the start, the inspiration, going to different social platforms, understanding the possibilities of what could be, was very exciting to consumers," Lopez said in an interview. "The most difficult part of the process was when you actually had to put a stake in the ground on one color. That's when the anxiety hit."

ChatHUE launched last October and has been optimized since. After the team added a visualizer that lets users see a recommended color in their own space, customer satisfaction scores jumped 15%, Lopez said.

The tool is one of several ways Behr is trying to keep users on its own site rather than losing them to AI search engines. Lopez acknowledged the threat from large language models that summarize product information without sending traffic anywhere. "When you go on any of these other large language models, it's offering you a wide range of different colors, different brands, some colors that aren't even available in store," he said. Behr's advantage, he argued, is proprietary color-hit data from its 2,000 Home Depot locations, which lets ChatHUE recommend specific, available shades.

Lopez's broader mandate includes product development and segment strategy. The company has been making gains with professional painters and designers, a segment it has courted more aggressively in recent years. Last year, Behr made KILZ exclusive at Home Depot from a big-box perspective, giving pros a single source for both brands.

The website relaunch is meant to serve both audiences. The old site was built as an ecommerce shop. The new one organizes around color exploration: a digital color wall, the ChatHUE tool, and project-specific palettes. "When you go to behr.com, it really creates that color destination," Lopez said.

On the creator side, Behr ran a "Hotline" campaign pairing DIY influencers with the brand. Lopez said the team gives creators wide latitude. "If I just want to do a message about Behr, then we publish that on our own platform," he said. "You have to be very sensitive and mindful to what the creators are also trying to achieve."

Internally, the marketing team is testing AI tools for productivity, but Lopez said the focus remains on brand quality. "We always want to ensure that our brand is showing up in the way that meets the standards of when we're not using AI," he said.

The company's exclusive partnership with Home Depot, now 45 years old, remains central. Lopez described the relationship as an extension of each other's teams. "The biggest benefit for us is just how we can really work with each other as an extension of each of our teams, in order to help grow our brand and help grow Home Depot overall," he said.

Lopez said the CMO role has grown more complex as the tools and channels multiply. "When you think about AI, and you think about content at scale, and you think about consumer centricity and how that's continued to evolve, and how experience – how important that is and what we're doing to make it more seamless and interconnected – it's continued to become more complex," he said. "But I think that's what makes any role in marketing more exciting, is that it's never the same."