This article was originally published in 2015 and was last updated on June 10, 2025.
- Tension: In a data-driven marketing world obsessed with speed and automation, the simple act of listening to customers can feel outdated—but DeWalt proves it’s anything but.
- Noise: Many marketing playbooks reduce customer feedback to generic satisfaction scores or one-off surveys, missing the deeper value of long-term, human-centered insight.
- Direct Message: DeWalt shows that when you treat customer insight not as a check-the-box task but as a living relationship, it becomes your most durable competitive advantage.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Marketing is full of metaphors.
We talk about building campaigns, targeting prospects, hammering home messages. But for DeWalt — a brand quite literally built on tools — the metaphor goes deeper. Because at the core of its marketing success isn’t just data or content or flashy product launches. It’s something older, quieter, and arguably more powerful: customer insight.
And not just a snapshot or a net promoter score. DeWalt has turned customer feedback into a functional, evolving, and deeply integrated mechanism for decision-making—one that informs everything from product concepts to packaging to website design. In an industry where innovation and durability are non-negotiable, DeWalt’s secret weapon isn’t just its product engineering—it’s its customer understanding.
That insight is powered by the DeWalt insight community, a long-standing feedback ecosystem that goes far beyond surveys. It reflects the brand’s commitment to a first principles mindset: the belief that if you’re designing tools for tradespeople who rely on them daily, your first job is to listen.
What happens when you stop guessing
When Shannon Chenoweth joined DeWalt’s parent company, Stanley Black & Decker, in 2012, she inherited a system with two big flaws. First, surveys went out to everyone—plumbers, electricians, carpenters—with no filtering or targeting. Second, engagement hovered around just 1%.
As Chenoweth, now the company’s market research manager, puts it:
“We’d have to keep sending [the surveys] out and sending them out and hoping that they were going to answer our questions.”
The company had insights—but they weren’t clean, actionable, or efficient. DeWalt needed a better way to ask questions—and a better community to answer them.
So that same year, they implemented Vision Critical’s customer intelligence platform, Sparq, and launched what would become the DeWalt insight community. It was a strategic pivot: move from disconnected outreach to an always-on feedback engine. Build a system not just for collecting answers, but for building relationships.
Building something with staying power
At the heart of the DeWalt Community is a foundational principle: everyone has something to contribute—but not in the same way.
Using tools like IdeaScreen and IdeaHub, the brand began to crowdsource product concepts and test early ideas. Some community members offer blue-sky innovation, others respond better to structured options. But the real strength lies in the blend—combining visionaries with pragmatists, dreamers with doers.
“We wanted everybody to participate,” Chenoweth says. “But everybody’s strengths are in different places.”
This thinking—of matching insight requests to community strengths—is what keeps engagement high. Instead of blasting out generic surveys, DeWalt asks targeted, purposeful questions: What would you pay for this new charger? What features matter most in a drill? How could this packaging be clearer?
And the feedback doesn’t gather dust. It flows directly to product managers, marketers, and designers.
When launching a new premium battery line, for instance, DeWalt used customer input to prevent confusion with existing models. Survey results directly influenced the naming conventions and labeling strategy.
“That really drove the differentiation in the marketplace among those batteries,” Chenoweth explains.
More than opinions—ongoing partnerships
The DeWalt community isn’t just a data source—it’s a relationship. Customers aren’t just answering questions. They’re co-developing tools they’ll one day use on the job site.
It’s not just about money either. Yes, there are incentives—$50 Amazon gift cards for survey participation, up to $1,000 for IdeaHub contributors—but that’s not what keeps people coming back.
“They like giving us information and telling us what they want and what they need,” Chenoweth says. “Because if they have some say in the design, that just helps them—because they’re using these tools every single day.”
It’s a relationship grounded in mutual respect. DeWalt doesn’t just gather data—it shows members what changes came from it. That closing of the loop—you told us, here’s what we did—creates lasting trust.
Outperforming the quick fixes
While most brands chase novelty — AI-generated personas, sentiment-scanning bots, real-time behavioral heatmaps — DeWalt has leaned into something older and more durable: the truth customers are willing to tell you if you ask the right way.
Since launching Sparq, DeWalt has increased community engagement from 1% to 30%. Its insight community has grown from 8,000 to over 10,000 members, with plans to reach 15,000.
Even web design decisions go through the customer lens. When preparing for a major website redesign, DeWalt asked community members to review competitor sites and provide feedback on usability, layout, and clarity. These insights guided everything from navigation to copy hierarchy.
And that’s the difference. While other brands use data to guess what customers want, DeWalt just asks them—and builds accordingly.
Direct message
DeWalt shows that when you treat customer insight not as a check-the-box task but as a living relationship, it becomes your most durable competitive advantage.
The best tools aren’t the ones that claim to know—it’s the ones that ask, refine, and iterate until they’re just right.
Insight that lasts longer than a launch cycle
For marketers looking to replicate DeWalt’s success, Chenoweth offers clear advice: don’t just report insights—tell stories with them. Don’t just collect data—act on it visibly. And above all, treat your customer feedback program as a relationship, not a transaction.
“You need to make sure that when you’re asking [for] their feedback, that you’re doing something with it—that they know that their voice matters to you.”
DeWalt’s approach isn’t flashy. It’s not about dashboards or data lakes or predictive AI. It’s about returning to first principles: ask the people you serve what they need. Listen carefully. And build from there.
In a world full of noise, that kind of clarity cuts deep. And it’s why—after all the tools and tactics—DeWalt’s greatest marketing asset still starts with a question.
