Marathon Petroleum to pilot mystery shop program
The retailer has announced its new Marathon Insight initiative, based on monitoring and enhancing its retail experience for customers.
Marathon Petroleum has announced the launch of a new mystery shop program by the name of “Marathon Insight”. The project aims to monitor and enhance the retail customer experience by assessing the performance of Marathon, ARCO and Tesoro-branded service stations across the United States.
Insight is set to enter its pilot phase in the fourth quarter of 2022 and go live in January 2023. For the project, the company has partnered with Ipsos Channel Performance, a research company focused on providing customer insights through site evaluations, effective feedback and analytics.
“Customers are central to everything we do including marketing our branded fuels. We aim to make visits to our retail stations as customer-centric as possible. To do that, it is vital that we have accurate and reliable feedback in order to know what we are doing right and what we can enhance,” said John Rice, Manager of Brand Marketing at Marathon, according to a press release published by news site CSP Daily News.
The firm announcement comes after a rebranding of its station network launched back in June. Several installations of the company across the country were rebranded with the new “Endurance” image.
“As the largest provider of mystery shop and site audit solutions in the convenience and mobility space, Ipsos will leverage deep experience and expertise to ensure Marathon’s stakeholders not only receive timely and critical insights to drive site-level action, but also the consultation and thought leadership to inform and support strategic decision making,” added Christopher Koetting, Senior VP at Ipsos Channel Performance.
Marathon petroleum ended last year in possession of 7,159 Marathon-branded outlets throughout 37 states and 1,086 ARCO-branded sites. This is a result of the sale of its Speedway gas station business, which consisted of 3,800 retail locations, to 7-Eleven in May of 2021.
