AUSTIN, Texas -- There's a Gulf Oil billboard along a major expressway in Chicago that reads "The Legend is Back." Simple enough promotion, but Gulf doesn't have a branded store in Chicago or in all of Illinois, for that matter. Instead, the billboard is emblematic of Gulf Oil's drive to enter--or return to--new markets throughout the United States, the most recent example being a return to Texas, as reported yesterday in CSP Daily News.
"We're broadcasting that the legend is back and that we're available," Rick Dery, senior vice president and chief sales and marketing officer for Gulf Oil, told CSP Daily News in an exclusive interview. "Distributors see that and they want to be first in a market [to bring the Gulf brand back]."
That was very much the case for Guy Oliver, whose Austin, Texas-based MTG Management is rebranding five of its 30 dealer sites from unbranded to Gulf.
"I kept reading that they were trying to expand the brand, so I kept reaching out to them," Oliver, the president of MTG, said. "My dad was in the industry, and as a child I remember the Gulf brand in Texas. It sounds kind of hokey, but I definitely remember the brand, I have a positive feeling about it, and I think most customers will have a positive feeling about it."
And as the "birthplace" of the Gulf Oil mark, he thinks consumers will be anxious to check out his rebranded sites.
"I think customers are going to respond very favorably to it, and I think there's going to be some first-mover advantage for us in our market so we can launch it and get it out there," Oliver told CSP Daily News yesterday. "My hope is that it will do well and we'd expand it."
Dery, who calls the revival on the Gulf brand in Texas "one of my proudest moments," is equally hopeful.
"It was on our radar before [we expanded into] Baltimore, Atlanta, etc.," he said. "With Texas being the birthplace of Gulf, and the No. 1 state with regard to station count, it was clearly within our hopes and desires that it was going to be one of our first new states where we announced our expansion."
That announcement came when Gulf Oil, Framingham, Mass., gained 100% ownership rights to the brand from former co-owner Chevron Corp.
"I get more excited about the Texas announcement than just about anything that I've done since being back here with Gulf in 2005," Dery said. "It's special for us to be back in Texas. It marks that we are now truly that national organization that we hoped to become once again."
More growth is likely there soon, as Dery noted, "We have a dozen offers on the table in Irving, Dallas, other markets."
And those "The Legend is Back" billboards are pretty good signs that the Gulf Oil brand will be back in Chicago and St. Louis pretty soon, too.
"We just hired a sales executive to cover the Great Lakes region," Dery revealed. "We're holding ourselves to maintaining certain standards with regards to the types of partners we will affiliate ourselves with, and the types of stations that we are branding. We want to be recognized as a premium brand in these markets, and we're targeting those types of relationships."
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