Believe it or not, car oil change service company Valvoline is in the midst of a fascinating retail marketing transformation.
Valvoline is a 160-year-old brand that’s still best known for its off-the-shelf car oil and machine lubrication products.
But did you know the company doesn’t even own that business line anymore? Valvoline sold it in 2022 to Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state oil and investment conglomerate. Valvoline now licenses its name to Aramco, and itself operates entirely as a brick-and-mortar retail business for oil change services.
The past couple years have marked a pivotal reset for Valvoline’s marketing and media, said the brand’s VP of marketing, Jake Lestan, told AdExchanger. Lestan joined Valvoline a couple years before the split, helping guide its transition from a heritage national brand to a “relatively new” retailer.
Oil and water
But what’s so different, really, about how Valvoline has to approach marketing today?
There’s the Valvoline chain store that changes your oil, and you can buy Valvoline oil at auto supply stores.
For one, Lestan said, the old Valvoline business could take a far more holistic and national branding approach to its marketing, where “the halo you get from the product and the service work in concert.”
The idea was to be ubiquitous and remain top-of-mind for people when their car might need a tune-up.
Nowadays, “it’s all about driving traffic to our stores,” Lestan said, and the brand has “right-sized” its marketing for that use case. Which is to say, Valvoline is “becoming more surgical from a local marketing perspective,” he said.
The brand put its marketing budget through a media mix modeling review after it sold off the car oil business, to adjust future spend based on the new business priorities. But, interestingly, Lestan said, the media mix review has “become a bit of a geography quest as much as it’s been about fine tuning the channel mix.”
There’s still a strong element of seasonality for the sellers of auto parts and oil change services, he said. People tend to get their cars tuned in early summer, think May or June, and again in the late fall.
Instead of focusing which channels to crank up or down for full-year branding, Valvoline now more effectively targets during those peak oil change periods and to support specific franchise stores, Lestan said. The brand finds more opportunity by zeroing in on local markets near its stores and identifying where – in the real world, not just within media channels – to deepen its investment.
Traditional media channels like radio and out-of-home billboards, for example, still play a role, especially since they reach people who are literally behind the wheel. But now Valvoline’s investment strategy is less about spreading budget across channels and more about allocating spend based on a specific market’s needs.
Grease the wheels
Valvoline began its marketing overhaul by drawing radiuses around stores to understand how foot traffic patterns work in each location.
The brand brought in an agency, indie media planning and buying shop Novus Media, to help with the task, Lestan said.
In fast-growing regions experiencing population booms, for instance, he said, Valvoline now prioritizes upper-funnel branding over “lower-funnel, pound-the-pavement”-type tactics to drive foot traffic.
But the new hyper-local focus also opens up new ways to invest, Lestan said, especially in dense or desirable markets where Valvoline might have been “drowned out” by the competition, including other big national brands.
Rather than making costly buys to blanket the entire Chicago TV market, for example, Valvoline can placed a tight radius around its own store locations in the market.
But local targeting isn’t new for Valvoline, Lestan added. The brand has been doing direct mail ads for decades, which can get down to the level of a particular mail carrier’s route. If anything, he said, the challenge is not to “go down a rabbit hole and over-target” an area.
“A DMA can look very different depending on where your store is located,” he said.
There’s a big difference between trying to win in a DMA versus in one’s own neighborhood. Instead of national branding campaigns, Valvoline focuses on untapped local opportunities, Lestan said, such as running on screens at nearby gas station, which is a good way to reach drivers.
But Valvoline is yet to jump aboard the retail media network bandwagon.
Valvoline hasn’t officially discussed starting its own retail data and media business, Lestan said, although, “philosophically speaking, it is really interesting.”
Oil change customers have a 15-minute wait, after all, making them ripe for targeted messaging.
So, how much of the cost of a typical oil change could a customer cover if they, say, agreed to watch video ads for 15 minutes?
“Maybe you and I are in the wrong business,” Lestan joked.
But seriously, he added, Valvoline’s research consistently shows that the main driver of repeat business is that people feel comfortable and enjoy the in-store experience.
So perhaps it won’t be worth treating waiting customers as a captive media audience.
