Miles will make you laugh, play music for you and even take your picture. He could be great relationship material—if he weren’t a fuel dispenser.
In November 2016, BP introduced Miles, or what it describes as a “personality pump,” to customers at four of its branded locations in the Chicago and New York markets. The Houston-based major oil company developed the interactive pump to solve a common issue: making the task of fueling up enjoyable.
“The trigger was thinking about our consumers and what matters to them most,” says Jo Brecknock, director of brand and communications for BP. “We know that nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to pump gas. How can you make the three to five minutes you spend at the pump a little bit more exciting?”
The dispensers themselves—all Wayne Ovation—were pre-existing at the sites, as were the Delphi displays on top. To create Miles, BP added a touchscreen tablet loaded with software and content and affixed it to the side of the dispensers so that customers could interact with the pump.
Recognition software senses when a car approaches and the driver gets out to fuel up.
“As soon as that trigger point happens, Miles will start his interaction,” says Brecknock.
He invites customers to pick music, play a trivia game, and take pictures and video to share with friends. BP partnered with online music streaming service Pandora and news parody site The Onion to create the content. The team aimed to make Miles’ “voice” humorous, playful and engaging, and to keep the interaction dynamic.
“We created a whole different set of experiences for how he talks to you for each time you visit at the pump,” says Brecknock. “When you visit one time, the way Miles talks should be different from the way he might treat you the previous time.” Miles cycles through different messaging during the day.
The BP-branded sites testing Miles include one in Naperville, Ill., owned by CrossAmerica Partners; a Chicago site owned by Graham Enterprise Inc.; and two Brooklyn, N.Y., sites owned separately by Franklin Pimentel and Ahmed Shafiq. BP chose each location for having high traffic and being well maintained and on a decent-size lot.
The Miles experience, limited to about five minutes, is about winning customer loyalty and ensuring a return visit by providing an enjoyable fueling experience, Brecknock says. Before rolling the interactive pump out to more sites, BP is evaluating a few factors, led by the degree of consumer interaction and the amount of content they create and share.
At the pilot’s launch, BP was not including messaging that would encourage a store purchase, although there is “a lot of potential,” Brecknock says: “We want it to be something that drives traffic to the site. It should be something that creates positive energy for the brand and makes consumers want to come back to the BP gas station.”
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