Meet Yesway's New Marketing Team
By Greg Lindenberg on Jun. 20, 2018WEST DES MOINES, Iowa -- Yesway, a new convenience-store retailer that has already amassed more than 100 locations since the debut of the brand in 2016, is now redefining its marketing team with the strategy of splitting the role of its chief marketing officer (CMO) into three areas—brand management, foodservice and merchandising.
The company, which has plans to have as many as 500 stores within the next several years, has hired Rutter’s veteran Derek Gaskins as senior vice president of merchandising and procurement and Thorntons veteran Jeff Keune as senior vice president of foodservice and innovation. Along with Darrin Samaha, Yesway’s current vice president and brand manager, they are sharing the role of CMO and approaching it collaboratively to help the company reach that store-count goal.
BW Gas & Convenience, doing business as Yesway, is based in West Des Moines, Iowa. The chain, one of CSP’s Top 202, has stores in Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It is an affiliate of Beverly, Mass.-based Brookwood Financial Partners, a real-estate and private-equity investment and asset management company.
In an exclusive interview, Yesway’s Chairman and CEO Thomas Nicholas Trkla joined Gaskins, Keune and Samaha to tell CSP Daily News about Yesway’s new marketing strategy. Trkla offered a high-level view of the new strategy and the team hired to execute it, while Gaskins, Keune and Samaha each offered details on their pillars …
Thomas Nicholas Trkla
“The thinking behind this started a while ago among my senior staff about where we could have the most impact in terms of operations,” Trkla told CSP. “The team we put together, they do things very well and very consistently. But to move the ball, we really had to be good at three things—we call them pillars— brand management, foodservice and merchandising.
“C-store marketing is a lot different than marketing as we’ve dealt with it before in our other businesses at Brookwood. It’s a very low-margin, highly competitive business. You really have to differentiate yourself by doing things better or different. It really requires a constancy—day in, day out creativity—and it’s just too big of a job. The C-level job that has the highest turnover of any C-level job is CMO.
“The complexity of the CMO role today compared to what it was 25 years ago has just changed demonstrably, primarily because of advances in technology, but also in the depth and breadth of the job itself. So what we really wanted was to have an absolute focus on those three primary pillars that could affect our operations and our EBITDA. As opposed to having one CMO who is going to be watered down or make a diluted effort, we have a collaborative marketing team.
“Darrin has already been doing brand management very well for us, and with the hiring of Jeff and Derek, with their very specific experiences and expertise, there’s foodservice and procurement and merchandising. In a sense, they’re a group CMO, but they have very specific responsibilities. They can’t work in a vacuum, they can’t work in a silo. They come at it from different experiences from companies like Rutter’s and Thorntons—as well as Darrin’s background in the digital area. They complement each other very well. Any one of them could have been CMO.
“We wanted to focus on constantly improving our brand, building brand equity as we roll out these standards across the portfolio and what products go in the stores—the merchandising and the procurement part of it, separate from the foodservice part. They’re related, but they are singular.”
Jeff Keune
“What I like about this approach, and what I like about the opportunity at Yesway, is that we truly are building something unique,” Kuene said. “You don’t see a lot of brands that quickly grow from an idea into 100 stores and beyond, especially with an aspiration to have 500 stores. Building a brand that is different, special and better in the marketplace, and building a foodservice culture in places that didn’t have it before but has the potential to grow foodservice beyond the stores and into the marketplace, is an opportunity to take share from other convenience stores and restaurants.
“What attracted me about this opportunity was the plan that Tom and the team created, with the three of us to build a foundation and to make sure that everything is working together. When you’re growing a brand from scratch, when you have stores that have an underleveraged or underdeveloped or nonexistent foodservice program and have the opportunity to take it from inspiration to strategy to tactics to execution across a growing number of stores, it’s a unique opportunity. With a group of marketing leaders that can work together so that the sum is greater than the individual parts, that’s something that can really help set this brand up for success.
“In foodservice, we’re leveraging the progress that Yesway has made as a brand to be ‘best at the base,’ as well as at innovation. There are certain platforms that are ubiquitous or expected in convenience, whether it’s coffee or roller grill or fountain or frozen or packaged commissary—how do you elevate those platforms? How do you simplify them, deliver better quality at a better price and flavor than anybody else in the industry? That is a huge part of what we are doing, because it can affect all the stores.
“And the other challenge is to build a two-year pipeline of innovation that can over the course of time, step by step, set us into a different space than almost any other brand. We have two tests going on right now. One is a bakery test, one is a pizza platform test. They’re riding that line from how you be best at the base and introduce some things that you may see in other c-stores in a different and better way, as well as stretch our brand to have that unique destination product.”
Derek Gaskins
“Despite the brief tenure of the CMO role, I have seen a lot of innovation there, driven by disruptive forces. It really starts with the customer and works backward," Gaskins told CSP. "I felt that Tom’s vision was one that was predicated on that, because he saw that merchandising was just as instrumental to the marketing and branding process as is foodservice. In this day and age where customers want everything and they want it now and they want it their way, that as the definition of convenience is being redefined, our role as marketers has to change with that process.
“Customers want the ultimate in personalization, and whether it’s the advertising vehicles or the communication vehicles that we use to reach them, or the merchandise or foodservice that’s in the stores that can change to match the local flair and the local flavor, brands that can figure that out and can crack that code are the ones that are going to win. That was something that from my vantage point was very attractive and led me to want to be a part of this team.
“Yesway’s private-label and foodservice initiatives help us find out what really resonates with the consumer and allows us to get credit for what our offering is, our merchandise mix. Private label many times will be the first contact someone has with the Yesway brand. Personalizing the branding and marketing goes along with that through our loyalty platform and the mobile app, allowing us to deliver the right offering, the right effort, the right promo to the right customer at the right time.
“Whether it’s looking at key categories that drive customers and grow market basket or defining our ‘good, better, best’ strategy within each category, we are becoming a lot more sophisticated and data-driven with how we go to market and around merchandising. And from a procurement strategy, we’re certainly buying better. That’s always part of it. And as we grow, we should also be buying better and getting better deals and passing that savings on to customers so we then get credit for it as a brand.”
Darrin Samaha
“I’m the youngest on the team, but I’m the Yesway veteran on the team. I come from the agency world. I like to think that I bring a different perspective to what we’re doing," Samaha said. "I used to work with a lot of different brands, and I saw pieces of the work that they would do, in particular in the digital space, but this is really a dream for a guy like me, a brand manager, to come in and build and manage the entire brand from the ground up. That takes a tremendous amount of time. It requires a deliberate approach, carefully listening to your customers, and a creative approach to marketing, not just in the traditional space, but in the digital and technology spaces.
“We’re doing some really awesome things for being just two years old. That’s just a flash in the pan from where we want to be. But the template is great, because there are so many opportunities to test and learn, and now with Derek and Jeff on board, it’s just a treat for me, because both of these guys have a tremendous amount of experience in the space, and I can already see the collaboration. I’ll ask Jeff or Derek questions about some of the things that we’re doing, and they’re very encouraging and will validate some of the thinking and challenge some of the thinking. The collaboration is already in place. But I really see opportunity for us in getting more creative with advertising, leveraging technology.
“I was fortunate enough to come on board and help launch and run our Yesway Rewards loyalty program. And Jeff and Derek have had tremendous experience in loyalty programs that will help our programs become even more successful. I’m really excited by the opportunity to tighten up our strategy from street to storefront to in-store, across all of the tactics that we have available from traditional advertising to digital. It’s an awesome place to be, it’s an awesome place to collaborate, and Tom and his team have been very open and willing to not just challenge our ideas, but to say ‘don’t be afraid to get creative and try new things, be different.' ”