Engaging partners to improve customer experience

Jack Whalen, Manager Brand Value at Phillips 66 talks about how they engage and educate their customers to ensure that the end consumer has the best experience possible with their brand.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, VP of strategy at Savage Brands and my guest today is Jack Whalen, Manager Brand Value at Phillips 66. So Jack, welcome to Brandonomics.

Jack: Well thanks, Robin. It’s nice to be here.

Robin: Well, I was commenting to you before, I love your title. Obviously Manager Brand Value isn’t something I see every day, but you’re doing more than just managing the brand; there’s a lot of customers and stakeholders and relationships that go along with that. So can you elaborate on what that means to you and how you’re kind of aligning all this together?

Jack: Sure. It is interesting when I tell people what my title is, a lot of folks think of a specific brand manager that’s working with it. We’re really fortunate at Phillips, part of our responsibility includes four brands. So we have three gasoline brands in the U.S. — the Conoco brand, the 76 brand and then obviously the Phillips 66 brand — but we also help manage our aviation brand that’s based in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. But the real value of the job and why the title has evolved a little bit is the interaction with our channel partners, and how we’re really relying on them to deliver that brand experience to the consumer.

Robin: Okay, so given how important they are to that, how are you communicating with them? I mean, what’s working so that they understand their role in delivering that brand experience?

Jack: One of the things that we’ve started to do most recently, Robin, is really take a step back and look at the customer that pulls into our service stations, the consumer, as we call them. And when we communicate with our customers, we’ve started taking a more baseline approach to relate what we’re asking them to do to the value that the consumer sees from that. So in the past, we were very, very good at execution, but our execution was really top down; we had ideas in corporate headquarters, we communicated those to our customers and asked them to execute them, whether they made sense for them or not. We’ve really taken a step back now and focused on the consumer, and tried to educate our customers on why we think it’s important that they behave that way.

Robin: Well I’m so glad you shared that, it really does tie it all back together and I appreciate you outlining that.

Jack: No problem, thank you.

Robin: Well great. Well this has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Phillips 66, created through the repositioning of ConocoPhillips, is one of the world’s largest independent downstream companies. The company operates three segment-leading businesses: refining & marketing, midstream and chemicals. The team of more than 13,500 employees are providing energy and improving lives daily. https://www.phillips66.com/