Meet&CoCOLFAX, N.C. — Home furnishings marketers do not lack data, tools or ideas. Their challenge is connecting those resources to business decisions, according to Cameron Cook Sellers, vice president of marketing and communications at Hooker Furnishings.
Source: https://www.furnituretoday.com/
“We‘ve never had more access to data and inputs,” Sellers said at the American Home Furnishings Alliance‘s 2026 Marketing and PR Conference. “But the paradox is: How do you connect it all, and how do you create a marketing rhythm that connects data, strategy, execution and measurement?”
Sellers, who joined Hooker Furnishings in 2024, brought more than 18 years of experience in senior marketing and brand management roles at Palliser, Natuzzi and Lowe‘s.
She said her seven–year experience at Lowe‘s exposed her to “best-in-class global marketing” and the competitive strategies employed by companies with enormous marketing budgets.
Look outside home furnishings
Although Sellers has spent much of her career in furniture, she said her team deliberately studies marketing beyond the industry.
Sellers follows companies including Amazon, Apple, Nike, Skims, Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Lowe’s and Home Depot to understand how they are influencing consumers and resetting expectations across retail categories.
“Our customers are being influenced — in the best way possible — by brands like Skims, Nike, Apple, Amazon, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Ulta,” she said. “That‘s where I want to spend a disproportionate amount of my time: thinking about where we are being influenced and what I can bring back to influence my team and our decisions.”
Sellers said her team examines major brand moves by attempting to reconstruct the strategy behind them.
Build around the customer, not the campaign
Traditional marketing frequently follows a linear process: conduct research, develop a brief, produce creative materials, buy media, launch the campaign and measure the results.
“That‘s not how consumers activate with brands in today‘s world,” Sellers said. “Customers don’t behave based on our campaigns. So it‘s up to us to flip that script and meet them throughout their journey with our brand.”
The necessary shift, she said, is from campaign-centric to customer-centric marketing.
She used Sephora as an example of a company that has created an interconnected brand experience around loyalty, shipping, product samples, birthday benefits and beauty services.
“I don‘t go into Sephora to buy a tube of mascara because of an email,” she said. “It‘s a cohesive beauty network. It‘s not an email campaign based on a lipstick or tube of mascara.”
Turn signals into business intelligence
Sellers described a modern marketing system built around signals, intelligence, decisions, brand experience, measurement and learning.
A decline in store traffic, for example, is“a fact, not a diagnosis,” she said. Marketers must determine whether demand, pricing, competitors or external conditions drove the result and then use that intelligence to recommend an action. “The next layer is where marketing earns its seat at the business table.”
Connect marketing to business results
Sellers said companies should evaluate marketing on three levels: what the department produced, how customers behaved and what changed for the business.
“The first is output. That‘s what marketing does,”she said. “We did this many posts, this many emails or showed up with this many elevator wraps at market. The next step is behavior: What was the engagement, traffic, consideration or retention?”
The final question is whether that activity generated revenue, increased margin, strengthened the brand or captured market share.
“It‘s not the output of what marketing did,” Sellers said. “There‘s a whole lot underneath that we have to unpack and serve up as signals and data insights to leadership.”
Her team reviews that cycle weekly rather than waiting until a campaign has ended.
“The goal isn‘t to make marketing busier,” Sellers said. “The goal is to make marketing work smarter by delivering better results to the bottom line.”
