Placing Front-line Personnel First Lifts Brand to Number One

Marketer: Gulf Oil

Marketing challenge: Steal share in remote and lucrative rural businesses

Scope of work - applied strategy: Beginning with a simple consumer insight, fully integrated advertising, sales incentive and co-op budget

Outcome: From a distant forth in the high-volume farm business to number one in just under five years

The story:

During my decade-long time in advertising and operations in oil and gas, an unsung hero was always the farm business. It is remote with a small number of locations, not really suited to big national budgets and so not very sexy.

But it is important as it feeds us. It is also very lucrative.

We were trailing badly in the business behind three national oil brands. Knowing the high-stakes opportunity, we set out to talk to farmers and ranchers about their operations and impressions of the oil companies serving their communities.

Overwhelming one insight kept coming back: rural buyers bought the agent, the guy or family business that delivered their fuel. With some small differences here and there, the oil companies themselves were interchangeable.

We changed strategy to be local first. We put in place a five-year sales incentive program with huge pay-outs to encourage our farm agents to get out into the community and talk to prospects and we supported it with advertising and local co-op funds.

For advertising, we sent agency representatives to hundreds of small towns to photographic our agents, their facilities and their families for use in local newspaper and in-store and even recorded agents speaking about their community and business for use in local radio.

The My Place advertising template was consistent nationally but changed in every town with pictures and sounds of our local agents with themes like:

  • “Automatic Fuel Delivery This Harvest. Call My Place Only Once.”, or
  • “There is Only One Place to Get a Truly Better Motor Oil. My Place.”

To work in concert with the sales incentive and advertising, we put in place co-op budgets with support posters and other advertising materials for activities important in rural communicates, like 4H.

Making our front-line personnel the voice of the brand, a home towner that customers and non-customers alike got to know at least a little bit contributed to steady market share gains. By taking a back seat, Gulf became the biggest player in the farm business in under five years.