Rick Sales:
Yes. And thank you. I think it’s really interesting. We’ve been doing this for a while and I like to compare what happens inside the store with what happens in the forecourt. Today in the store, we have a well defined process for medium and message. So menu boards are menu boards, and they’re used in a certain way. They’re in a certain location. There’s messages that go in those menu boards, impact screens are well defined, video walls have a certain purpose. So when we have conversations about strategy, different mediums and different messages, and we’re talking about the store, most retailers have a good understanding of how they’re going to help that consumer through their shopping journey. Then we step outside on the forecourt and we are on another planet. We’ve moved to 1991. And in 1991, it’s all about process, right? So we are no longer talking about medium and message. We’re talking about merchandising and getting the pumptoppers, buying the pump with the display inside even though the display is small, and all these things that are the practice of the industry. And then the pandemic hit and the pandemic exposed clearly that these things don’t work, that they failed to achieve the goals that a retailer needs on the forecourt because right now, no one’s coming in and no one’s interested in the two for $2. People need to know what’s happening in the store and you’re struggling to communicate it with printed paper. And the discussion has changed. And people like Chris who are visionaries and see the problem, take the initial steps of saying, how do I change this problem? How do I change the medium and how do I change the message to achieve the desired result in a world where I have a more distracted consumer that I need to convey more to? And that’s what we are today.

Jeff Lenard:
Rick, you mentioned pumptoppers, In 2008, NACS led an effort to communicate about swipe fees. We looked at getting pumptoppers out to retailers that want to tell their message. We found there was something like 33 different sizes for pumptoppers and that became an issue. What we are talking about in communications today goes beyond the paper. You’re talking about other types of communications—not just on the traditional screen that you see at the pump, but also in different places that people can see. Take us through the ways that people can hear or see a message go beyond the dispenser.

Rick Sales:
We are all consumers. We all go to the store and refuel. So we all have the same experience. We know how distracted of a moment that is. We’re putting our credit card in the machine. We’re putting gasoline in the tank. We have people in the car. And I find it very interesting when I talk to a retailer and I try to have a conversation about what is that consumer’s perception, what can they see and what attracts them. And we start talking about how the human brain works and it shuts down things that it doesn’t need. Animation is key in that environment. And there’s certain mediums that can provide animation and other mediums that can’t. Similarly large messaging, simple to understand messaging, clear calls to action—they all work in an environment where you have a distracted consumer and you need them to pay attention for five to 10 seconds and make a decision. Yes, no, am I coming in or not? Is that driving me in or not? Two for $2, doesn’t get me to come in because two for $2 is available everywhere and I know it, right? So the message is important and the medium has to be impactful and large enough to get me to pay attention when I’m distracted with five or six different things. It’s a busy time at the forecourt.

Jeff Lenard:
And, and of course the key is to not just drive somebody inside the store, but to drive them inside where the more profitable items are. Chris, how do you use communications at the pump to drive people to where you want to drive them? What is the process that you go through in going from trial to conversion to repeat customer?

Chris Hartman:
It’s always a tricky thing when you’re trying to market to people, especially these days with our short attention spans and trying to get them to go inside your store, try something new, do something different that’s outside their norms. It really takes something that draws their attention, but it also has to be simple. Having something with colors and the right wording is really how I look at it as a message that gets across to different people. So you have to say, who am I trying to market to? What am I trying to market to them? And then, what do they want to hear and see? We really focus on those keys for our market to get our message across of the new products that we have, the core products that we have. And that’s how we drive the conversion from the fuel pump into the store.

Jeff Lenard:
With our industry, we’re known for beverages. When you talk about QSRs, you go there for food and oh by the way, get a beverage. With our industry, go for the beverage, hopefully get a lot more than that. But the idea of selling beverages, there’s also a lot of motion. There’s a lot of action. There’s a lot of excitement that you can do so that they want to come into that cooler. They want to use that dispenser to get a fountain beverage. What are the things that you look at when you tell those stories at the forecourt?

Chris Hartman:
I think first and foremost that perception of us being just a beverage stop or a gas station is something that as an industry we’ve tried to change over a number of years, of the gas station versus convenience store. Using that verbiage of we’re a convenience store is important in my mind because yes, we sell fuel, we sell gas, we sell diesel—that’s obviously a big part of everyone’s business. But at the same time, our industry has expanded into food, beer, wine, lottery—lots of other areas that we can offer inside the store. Our customers may not know that we have those. So getting them to understand what we have, what can we offer them that they want and showing it to them in a way that makes them feel comfortable with coming in and utilizing whatever it is that they want to utilize is how you can really get someone from thinking I’m here to fill up and maybe I’ll go in and grab a water at most, to I’m going in to grab a 128-ounce bag of spiked slushies to take home and go to my friend’s party later tonight. Those are the things that I’m always thinking about—how do we differentiate ourselves as a company and as an industry from that perception of just being a one-trick pony, or being a smokes and Cokes kind of industry into we can offer you everything that you’re looking for. One-stop shop, come and get it here.

Jeff Lenard:
When you have a gas price war, there’s only one winner and the customer will go someplace else every time there’s a fill up. So you have to win every time. And the idea is how do you focus on making your store the place where people go because of what you have inside the store, and oh by the way, while I’m here I’ll get a fill up. Rick, when we talk about communications at the pump, there is the dispenser and then there’s different ways to get people’s attention. And there’s signage that can go past the dispenser so it’s not just the gas price sign that conveys your gas price. It’s not just the dispenser where you have the opportunity with a pumptopper, or maybe some sort of visual medium there on the dispenser, but also using signage on store windows that really make a traditional ad come alive because it’s a video ad and it’s something that stands out. I would imagine when it’s later in the evening where it must pop and you just see high definition advertising that is very appealing and also very focused on what the customer can do inside the store.

Rick Sales:
I think this is what’s really exciting about what’s happening today and why I love some of the things that we do with Chris. I show them to people as really leading edge examples of how we communicate with consumers today. So let’s talk about that. The secret sauce of talking to consumers today is brand messaging. Brand messaging is what’s going to create the emotional connection that is going to bridge the gap of price. The connection that I go to Rutter’s is because why go anywhere else? That is their tagline. That is a message. That’s branding that we convey with words as well as with images in the film displays in the windows, because that’s really what we want the consumer to think: Why go anywhere else—the brand message. That’s a secret sauce of what we’re telling people, right? So the film display provides an animated, live, beautiful, impactful canvas that allows you to deliver that right brand messaging.

Rick Sales:
And since it’s not paper, it does some things that are very unique and key to the industry. The ability to daypart that window. Number one, your message in the morning needs to be different than your message in the afternoon and in the evening. Technology allows you to do that without labor. Traditionally in the past, you would send people to merchandise different messages. Today, automation can handle that distribution of messaging so your people can focus on being creative and thinking about the right brand message as compared to putting up the right message at the right time, technology will do that. The film by it being a large display, it is also something that people cannot ignore. We know that from the way that we build we cannot ignore movement, right? It’s clear that we can get consumers to react to animation. And it’s also well studied and understood that with static signage the brain will autonomously discard what is not relevant to you. So you can spend a lot of time putting together an ad and not hit the consumer. And with a playlist, you can have 10 ads and bring up three messages that are relevant to the consumer and trigger the proper emotional response to get the consumer to come into the store, which is really what you’re trying to accomplish. When you come in the rest of the signage takes over. Remember we have a robust strategy for signage inside the store. I got you to come in. Now, I’m going to direct you to my profit centers. I’m going to direct you to my LTOs.

Rick Sales:
I’m going to direct you to the things that you know and love about my brand, but on the forecourt, I needed you to make the decision I must come in. And I did that with properly daypart messages, impactful images in animation and simple calls to action. My favorite call to action is Chris’s beer cave. We have an ad that runs on the film display and the film display shows beer messaging and it says our beer is at 29 degrees. A simple message that speaks volumes about what’s going on inside the store. It tells you I have a beer cave, which means I have a variety of beers, including potentially your beer in cans and bottles and all sorts of different choices. Six words said that my beer is always cold, two words said that my beer is always cold.

Rick Sales:
You can count on that. So this is really very powerful messaging tied with animation and visuals that get you to pay attention and say, yeah, the beer at Rutter’s is always at 29 degrees, that’s part of the Rutter’s brand. I accept that. So when I need beer Rutter’s is at the top of my choice list. So we have accomplished two things with forecourt signage: increasing traffic to the store and increasing a revisit. Using the large medium and using impactful messaging to achieve that allows you to have the indoor signage take over and direct the consumer to your conversion in sale. We think that that is the way of the 21st century in a distracted world to help the consumer make a choice by providing them good messaging at forecourt.

Chris Hartman:
I think you touched on a lot of good points there, Rick. In my mindset, digital is the way of the future and it’s the way of the now. Having digital signage helps fix some of the labor issues. You’d have putting up signs, removing signs, forgetting to remove signs or forgetting to put up signs. So it helps change what’s going on there. It makes it easier to quickly adjust your message. If you’ve got a loyalty program that gives cents-off rewards, like ours does, when gas prices started getting higher we wanted to make sure we were pushing that message that you can get 3 cents off a gallon every day at Rutter’s.

Chris Hartman:
So letting them know that all the time, whether it’s at our pumps, on the screens we have there, on our fuel signs where we have digital screens as well, or whether it’s with the LED window film, all of those messages are used to send our customers the right idea that if come here you’re going to get your cents off of fuel. If you buy stuff in the store, you can get more cents off of fuel. That’s the mindset customers have right now is how do I save money on fuel because it’s so expensive. So being able to adjust with digital assets like that really has been important to us because it allows us to get ahead of some others in our market that don’t have those digital assets and don’t have the ability to adjust their message like that.

Chris Hartman:
It’s not just social media, it’s not just your app. You have to be able to do it when people are driving, when people are standing there filling up, and even if they’re not filling up and they’re parking in front of your store. The stores that we’re building are 10,000-plus square feet. That’s big store and they may not get around to the whole thing. So they’re seeing things that we’re selling that they may never have known that we were selling because a lot of customers pinpoint what they need. They go to that area, they pick up what they want, whether it’s a candy bar or a case of beer or a hot dog. And then they proceed to check out. So our ability to let them know all the different things that we have and the things that they likely are looking for allows us to grow our basket with them and allows them to spend less time going from store to store.

Chris Hartman:
We all know customers these days are time-starved. And I think more so than ever after the pandemic, we learned that time is short, right? And we enjoy doing things that we want to do. So we want to take advantage of that. These days, people are wanting to go and stop at one place that’s clean, that has what they need, and then they can move on with their lives. Building your brand and your messaging around your brand is important to growing that perception with your customers and making them choose you over your competition.

Jeff Lenard:
It does fit into the overall narrative of telling the store’s story. Rick, I think it’s important when you mentioned the 29 degrees beer cave. Here we are in the hottest point of the year, you see something that says 29 degrees. Even if you don’t like beer, you may go in that beer cave and just cool off for a minute. If one thinks the only time to incent someone is when you walk through that door, it’s too late. You have three to four minutes when somebody’s filling up, that’s roughly idle time. And then they literally step on the gas in terms of how they speed up their day. Then they go in the store and they attack, they go through quickly. Chris, what’s the process that you go through when you look at how you use signage?

Chris Hartman:
It’s telling our story. We talk about our products, our service. I’m also proud to talk about that we pay for our employees a starting wage of $17 an hour. I think it sends a message in our community, being in a more rural community, that we’re taking care of their people. And I think they see that reflected when they come in and they’re greeted and they’re taken care of. They see the cleanliness in the stores and then we’re also able to talk about the different charity work, which means a lot to us as well through Rutter’s Children’s Charities.

Chris Hartman:
We can show how we’re making an impact in our communities, but the great thing is we can do it digitally and we can show it to them whenever we want to. And we can show them what we want to show them with the click of a mouse with a picture that we took just yesterday and we can have it out at all the stores that have these digital assets right away. So, you know, there’s a lot of benefits to it. And again, building that story, that brand, that thought within a person that I’m going to skip this guy down the road to go to Rutter’s is something that I’ve worked really hard on, my dad has worked really hard on. As the fourth generation, all the generations before me have worked hard on to build that connection with our community.

Chris Hartman:
Times change and now we’ve got to do it in a quicker way. We’ve got to do it with people who maybe didn’t always grow up with us as we move into new spots. And so we’ve got to be able to sell that story as we grow. And as we change and adapt that we’re doing new things, exciting things, and here’s what we’re doing and hopefully you like it. Then it allows us also to get feedback from our customers and it allows me to adjust what we’re doing if they like it or don’t like it very quickly.

Rick Sales:
And if I may build on what you’re saying, Chris, because it really makes so much sense and it’s so powerful. I think that the brand experience is what people embrace, it’s what people come back to. And you’ve talked about different elements of the brand experience, and I’m excited about some subtle elements of how we contribute to the brand experience using the medium and in particular, the digital film, right? We’ve done some testing and we’ve sent consumers to evaluate stores with digital film, and there’s a lot of attributes that allure to the brand for the film. It is modern looking, so people say this company is investing in the future. They have modern facilities. I listen to a lot of people like Chris tell me what they’re trying to do and one of the things that we did with LG because this film is a product of LG.

Rick Sales:
We have a collaboration with them to bring it to market using the Open Platform from Abierto. And when we talked about this we said, look: the design of the store is intentional so people can see the parking lot, the aisles are down, the people that work here need to be able to see what’s happening outside. Consumers feel comfortable with a clean store. They’re trying to keep the windows clean. We could have put monitors ages ago in the windows and conveyed digital messaging, but blocked the view. The film allows us to convey digital messaging in an even bigger canvas, but leave the store as it was designed and intended as a beautiful store with clear views where people feel comfortable and safe shopping. And the messaging is working on the forecourt. So this not only is an evolution in how we communicate is really an evolution in technology of how we outfit the store. This film is an eighth of an inch thick. It’s almost not there. It looks like tinting yet it delivers impactful messaging 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without any employee involvement at the location.

Chris Hartman:
Rick, I’ll just say when we were getting into doing the digital film, the thing that interested me the most was our ability to use media that we already had. And we didn’t have to go create new stuff just for this one product. We were able to use our spike slushies commercial and cut pieces of it out and put it onto our windows. And so I found that really cool because it’s nice, it’s colorful, it has some really cool movement in it. And then right next to it, I could also put some words and I could put really simple wording that said spike slushies, and then they could see what I was talking about at the same time. That movement connects with people, it draws their eye and then when you have a simple message right next to it of what it is, that really gets the message across quickly and they make a decision. Does that mean something to me or not? And what I’ve found is that it does mean something to them and it does help create trial and draw people to our stores when we’re able to do things like that, whether it’s spike slushies or breakfast sandwiches or coffee or anything else we’re doing. That movement plus the static nature of things allows us to get both their attention and sell the message to them at the same time. And when you’re able to do that, it’s a much more powerful thing than just a static sign sitting there in a window.

Jeff Lenard:
Rick, for somebody who’s interested in this, what’s the thought process, what’s the next step for how they might up the ante on their communications at the forecourt?

Rick Sales:
I encourage you to visit us at www.ab-net.us/ so you can see what we’ve done with other clients and what’s available. I also encourage you to follow us on LinkedIn because we post a lot of client content in LinkedIn. You can see what other folks are doing, but we are very happy to get together with you and have a conversation about your marketing strategy and decide what things fit your purpose, because there’s lots of different mediums and message.

Rick Sales:
So understanding your store profile and understanding your messages are super important here. And I think the ultimate, the last thing here is when I talk to a lot of executives, they wonder how hard is it? How much is it going to cost? They look at the idea, they like it and it’s new to them. So they wonder what’s the lift here? What do I have to do to make this work? Right? I’m grateful for Chris’s comments about being able to use the content because this was really a strategic decision from Abierto’s point of view. The point here is to make it easier for the retailer to be creative, to work on their branding and messaging strategy. It’s not about creating busy work. It’s not creating a different type of digital merchandising where lots of people need to do a lot of work.

Rick Sales:
The retailer can invest in content, invest in creative, invest in technology and drive their messaging. So that’s an important conversation early on, understanding how the formula works differently, what you can do when you change your messaging during the day, and really discussing whether that fits with where you are on the marketing continuum. You need to be thinking strategic. You need to be thinking, how do I go beyond selling a cup of coffee to having people experience what it might feel to walk into my store when they’re on the forecourt? It’s a totally different level. One thing is, yes, you have coffee. I know everyone has coffee, but I know you have the most amazing coffee because you just brought in bean to cup or whatever it is that gets me to find out if that’s true, or if I know the brand gets me to follow up on it because I trust the brand.

Rick Sales:
I get to talk to a lot of people who have exciting views about the future, very positive expectations of how our business as an industry is going to grow, how we going to serve consumers. And they want to tell people about online ordering. They want to tell people about curbside pickup. They want to tell people about what’s crew served versus self-serve. There’s so many things to tell today that is an exciting time to find a new way of doing it. So if you want to learn more, reach out to me, go to our website, visit us on LinkedIn, let’s have a chat and let us hear what you’re trying to accomplish. And we’ll be happy to share some thoughts with you.

Outro:
Convenience Matters is brought to you by NACS and produced in partnership with Human Factor. For more information, visit convenience.org.

show less