Yin and yang. Yet another story on the battle between Lowe's and Home Depot:

Home Depot built itself into a retail giant with the style of scuffed and steel-toed workboot, its warehouse-style stores so big the lights sometimes don't reach into the shadowy corners of its vast aisles, with their handwritten signs and often dusty floors.

Lowe's has a different style, and you can see the contrast in Snellville, where its store right across from Home Depot is more brightly lit, its white and blue signs more cheerful and its floors spotless...

Home Depot and Lowe's once shared a contractor-oriented look. Then Lowe's took a different course in 1994, when it started opening 115,000-square-foot stores that included home decor and appealed to women as well as men. The approach, less intimidating to people who are not experienced do-it-yourselfers, has helped it to thrive in recent years despite a weak economy.

Lowe's strategy is classic, by-the-book strategy for any Number 2 competitor going up against the Number 1 company in a market: cover the market segment the leader is ignoring and force them to choose. When Coke looked like the unbeatable soft drink company, Pepsi zeroed in on younger consumers and targeted them aggressively, forcing Coke into a difficult choice: respond and ris alienating Coke's older base of loyal customers or ignore Pepsi and give up leaderhsip in the youth segment of the market.

Lowe's is wisely doing the same thing, staking out a strong position in the novice DIY (do it yourself) market and forcing Home Depot to choose between responding aggressively and alienating the contractor market it prizes so much or ignoring Lowe's and letting them gain leadership in this segment.

The founders of Home Depot brag about the early days when just before opening a store they would scruff up the floors and spread woodchips around the floor to convey an atmosphere contracors and handymen would feel comfortable in. Lowe's realizes that it would be foolish to try to imitate Home Depot and compete with them head-on. A lesson all retailers would be wise to remember.