Om Shankar, GVR: "Profit is shifting inside the c-store"
PetrolPlaza speaks to Om Shankar, Gilbarco Veeder-Root's European Marketing Director, about the company's new role in the current retail and energy transition. Irrespective of where a company is in its decarbonization process, GVR wants to help its customers connect with consumers.
Om Shankar has been the European Marketing Director at Gilbarco Veeder-Root for just over a year. With various engineering degrees, he spent the first ten years of his career in an oil field in Houston (Texas) figuring out new ways of pulling oil out of the ground. Now he enjoys helping GVR’s customers navigate the current market transition and building strategies for the future.
You’ve come to Gilbarco Veeder-Root at a very interesting time. The company has gone from being a traditional forecourt equipment supplier to now serving the industry in the c-store and mobility transition.
We are still operating in a growing market. Even if you look at our legacy business – we have no doubt that our business within the fuel solution space will continue to grow. If you look at high growth markets, such as India, they are exploding right now with new sites. It remains a clear focus for us. With that said, the industry's push towards decarbonisation has never been stronger. That change from our customers can take form in many ways. It could be EV chargers at their forecourts, which we supply. If a company is just starting out in electrification, or looking to scale, they need help managing their ecosystem of chargers, and we can assist with our backend platform.
If we recognize that our customer for the next 15, or some cases even 30 years, will continue to need petrol pumps, our goal is to make that equipment as efficient as possible. We are actively working to reduce the energy consumption of the motors that ultimately drive fuel dispensers. The space in fueling solutions is still very attractive to us.
I guess that is the fascinating part of this moment in time – to provide solutions to innovative markets such as the Nordics while continuing to cater the growing demand for traditional fueling equipment in places like India.
As I said, we are committed to remaining strong in fueling solutions. We continue to invest in the best solutions. But we recognize that we must move to the broader fueling and retail ecosystem to help our customers. The Nordics is a very interesting market. If you go to Oslo right now, there's a queue of people at a gas station waiting to charge their electric vehicle. That's a tremendous amount of time that our customers have to interact with consumers. We want to help our customers contact that consumer irrespective of where they are on the decarbonisation journey.
What is the role of the consumer in today's service station?
With our technology and services, the customer now has the data and ability to interact with the consumer off the forecourt in order to entice them in. If a consumer is driving by a location with highly dense traffic, our customer can use a geo-location service to see them, and is able to ping them with an offer to say “come in right now and fuel up for x amount of discount,” or “come grab a coffee for this promotion.” We have more ways to bring them in. Again, how is that customer interacting with the consumer? What devices are they interacting with the consumer on? Is it on their mobile phone through a dedicated app? Is it through an electric charger or the gas station pump? Irrespective of where that consumer is on that forecourt, we are going to enable our customer to interact with them in any capacity. Finally, once we get them in the c-store the goal is to grow their basket size as much as possible, recognising that profit slowly but surely is going to shift inside the c-store. We can grow that basket through promotions, cross-selling and up-selling inside that c-store – that’s an area that we are heavily investing in. We very much see that the future consumer of the c-store is not one that's going there explicitly for gas.
A very interesting development we see today is big players like GVR entering partnerships and collaborations with other companies. A sign of how complex forecourt and c-store ecosystems are becoming. How do you view this development?
We recognize that we have extreme expertise in many areas. Our connectivity strategy right now, our ability to take data, bring it up to the cloud and use it, is very strong. Our Insite360 business unit fits into this vision. They continue to generate new ways of drawing insight from the tremendous amount of data that exists on the forecourt. Data is everywhere. I recently saw how many pulses our dispensers send up to the cloud and it's in the billions.
With that said, we can help our customers on both sides of the profit equation. We know that we have to serve our customers on the revenue side of the cost equation. How do you get that consumer inside the c-store? How do you grow their basket-size? There are areas in that space that we are passionate about and will push to do ourselves, or we may do through a partnership. Our most recent announcement was a partnership with a company called Mosaic which operates in the loyalty ecosystem. And that's a really interesting place for us – we know that loyalty is a clear-cut direction that our customers are moving towards. If you look at all the announcements from Circle-K and 7 Eleven for coffee subscriptions, for soda subscriptions, for car wash subscriptions... This space really excites us but it's a little more adjacent, so we are able to do it through a really great partnership. And that trend will continue, there's no doubt about it.
What would be GVR's near-term goals in terms of the steps and success criteria that you discussed during a presentation? You mentioned catering for the future and the present.
There's four ways I'd answer that. The first one is we want to lean into experience. We want to make amazing experiences at the pump. I remember growing up and my time at the pump was no dream for me, we want to change that reality. Whether it's through loyalty, promotion, gamification… We want experience to be at the core of what we bring to the market. Second, we can't develop amazing experiences unless we have absolute insight into who our end-consumer is. So how can we know the end consumer better? With that transactional data that's flowing through all of our products. Three, we need to continue to embrace innovation at the core. Whether it's helping our traditional fuel retail customers win in that future state or whether it's bringing these tech-led experiences to market, we are going to continue to invest in innovation. The fourth and final area is understanding that innovation for the new reality of fuel retail is very different. Working hand in hand with our customers to be able to develop products that fit their needs, that is something that I am passionate about, adopting more of an agile, scrum mentality to the way that we develop new solutions, products and experiences.
Interview by Oscar Smith Diamante
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