Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores Chief Marketing Officer Patrick McLean wants to take what is already a great brand and make it iconic.
“I think we have just such a great opportunity ahead to tell our story,” McLean told CSP on his goals for 2026. “What we do for our customers is really remarkable, and it's a special company, and I want us to be synonymous with the travel stop category. When you think of the travel stop, or you think of a road trip, we want you to think of us first and foremost.”
McLean is excited to see that personal and business travel is trending upward since the COVID-19 pandemic. For their business, “that’s all really good news,” he said. The flip side is the commercial trucker business has been struggling due to economic uncertainty and some of the tariff activity that’s slowed the transport of goods around the country.
Consumers are also feeling the pinch of inflation, he said, and they’re continuing to see more upward pressure on cost from suppliers.
“So all that's going to start hitting the pocketbooks more and more for consumers and then they might not make as many road trips,” he said.
- Love’s Travel Stops is No. 15 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by store count.
Despite the headwinds, Love’s can reach icon status by continuously improving the customer experience, he said.
McLean, who started in May, is the Oklahoma City-based travel center chain’s first CMO. Love’s has more than 660 travel stops across the country.
One of the highlights since he started has been the launch of Love’s Media Group, the company’s first retail media network.
“In a lot of ways, it's a signal of how we're going to behave moving forward,” he said. “We really want to be strategic about the role that marketing plays for the company in this next phase of growth for the franchise but also leverage the ecosystem of partnerships that we have.”
Love’s consumer packaged goods partners are key to this success, he said. McLean said he wants to make sure they are marketing together and reaching the customer base in a way that’s accretive to their brands but is also driving more business and more preference to purchasing those products and services at Love’s.
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