If your business disappeared tomorrow, would anyone in your community actually care?
That was the question Nick Triantafellou, director of marketing and merchandising at Weigel’s, posed to retailers during an education session Wednesday at the annual Midwest Fuel and Convenience Trade Show, M-PACT in Indianapolis—setting the tone for a broader challenge to how the industry defines “community marketing.”
Triantafellou said the term "community marketing" is widely misunderstood and often reduced to campaigns or social media activity. Instead, he said, when community marketing is culturally relevant, and has community-first thinking, it can strengthen loyalty, increase frequency, energize teams and build lasting brand trust in the markets retailers serve.
“When we talk about what community means, we’re talking about routines of our day-to-day lives of our consumers,” he said.
Drawing on his experience leading marketing for the Knoxville, Tennessee-based c-store retailer, Triantafellou described a strategy focused on daily habits—morning coffee runs, after school snacks and quick meal solutions—rather than relying on one-off promotions.
“It’s the relevance in the right moments that matter with community marketing,” he said.
Triantafellou offered a framework of how community marketing, when done intentionally, can fuel both purpose and performance.
He said it is important for retailers to establish what their customers care about and build a repeatable program around it. He said retailers need to make sure it is easy to execute and then to measure behavior.
When it comes to community marketing, Triantafellou said stores need to be involved.
“We are constantly communicating to our stores not only what we are doing in the community marketing, but what we are doing with loyalty,” he said.
The store is the place that brings the energy and because they are a part of the community marketing the execution changes, he said.
Triantafellou also discussed how the convenience-store chain created its name, image and likeness (NIL) partnerships with University of Tennessee athletes. He shared how the promotions boosted loyalty, social media engagement and sales for Weigel's.
- Weigel's is No. 84 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of convenience store chains by store count.
Established in 1931, Weigel’s is a family-owned East Tennessee business operating 84 stores, along with its own dairy and bakery.
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