Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage Brands and my guest again is Jack Whalen, Manager Brand Value at Phillips 66. So Jack, I’m so glad you’re back on Brandonomics.

Jack: Well thanks Robin, it’s good to be back.

Robin: Well I want to know some about your priorities for the coming year, so can you elaborate for us a little bit on what’s in your brand’s strategies are on how you’re going to grow the business this year.

Jack: We’ve really done a good job this year in focusing on a couple key things that we think will really be beneficial for our customers and we’ve kind of termed it in-house as a brand revitalization.

Robin: Okay.

Jack: So we’ve broken that into two components and we’ve started communicating pretty specifically with our customers around the importance of operational excellence at the store – so their ability to execute day in and day out with the consumer to give them what they’re looking for – and even over the 30 years that I’ve been doing this consumers still want basically the same things; they want a friendly environment, a safe environment, they want to be able to get in and out quickly and they want to be able to feel as though the place is clean. And then the second piece of that is focusing on asset quality. For several years our focus really drifted away from that and we kind of left that responsibility to our customers. So although we won’t be changing the way we deal financially with our customers, we will be asking them more specifically to focus on improving that asset quality because when we look at some of the competition that has entered the market place over the last several years, they’re really building big, beautiful assets and really putting in a facility that consumers are attracted to and deliver an experience that they enjoy.

Robin: So it sounds like part of the winning strategy here is having the combination of what your team brings to the table as well as what the local service partners bring to the table as well.

Jack: Yeah, absolutely. Our value to our customers is our ability to use our size and resources to do consumer research and to make sure we’re staying constant with what the consumer is telling us is important and then helping our customers deliver that on a day to day basis at their facilities.

Robin: Okay, well that definitely makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for sharing that Jack.

Jack: Oh thank you Robin.

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