By Will Novosedlik

One of the biggest challenges of running a house of brands is that since each one tends to have its own identity, positioning and value proposition, there’s no real benefit in trying to leverage the parent company’s consumer equity for support. In fact, with usually almost no visibility at shelf level, it may not have any at all.

Procter and Gamble is a classic example. While P&G is an investor-and employee-facing brand, products like Tide and Swiffer are what consumers see. Tide customers don’t buy Tide because it’s owned by P&G. They just happen to be buying P&G because of Tide.

Another example is Parkland, or as its president Ian White refers to it, “one of the biggest connectors of consumers across Canada that no one’s ever heard of.” It’s the company behind popular Canadian fuel and convenience store brands Chevron, Ultramar, Pioneer, Fas Gas, On the Run, Marché Express and food retailer M&M Food Market. When you connect the dots between convenience, retail and fuel brands, you get a network of 600 gas station and convenience stops across Canada and the U.S.

But the company does bring its disparate brands together. It does so by way of its three-year-old loyalty program, Journie. Says White, “Over the years, we’ve bought a number of local brands and knit them together by making the Journie rewards program available to all. This allows us to build our national footprint.”

What White is really proud of is the fact that Parkland has taken a group of essentially regional assets and brands and created a national champion. And not just a national one, a Canadian-based international champion with operations across 25 countries. “When I started nine years ago, we were largely a fuel distributor with access to other people’s organizations. Then we developed a way to connect all of those brands through the Journie rewards program, allowing us to be much more customer centric.”

As White points out, when you bring organizations together through acquisition, there is a risk of diluting the culture and, ultimately, the brand. “But we believe strongly that the goodwill and the value perceptions that have been generated by each local brand is something we want to build on versus remove.” Making it easy for its consumers to carry on benefiting from all its offerings is important to Parkland.

And this year, by partnering with Air Canada’s Aeroplan, the Journie rewards program extended into the travel category and did just that. “The opportunity with Aeroplan is to continue to increase our connection to consumers, to drive organic growth for the company, improve choice within the ecosystem that we created and grow it so that we’re developing a sticky relationship,” White explains. After all, Parkland and its brands are an important part of the road trip experience, so this move is completely logical.

What does this mean for the average consumer? “What we hear from customers is that they want choice,” White says. “They want to be able to save up for a large transaction, but also be able to do what we call ‘micro redemption’ more frequently on day-to-day items. So the construct that we’ve developed with Air Canada allows for consumers to make decisions and choices on whatever they would like to take advantage of: fuel rewards, food rewards, and now travel rewards. People will be able to earn and burn through the Journie rewards program as well as the Aeroplan program.”

It extends the brand’s reach. The Journie program has 4.5 million members, but with this new partnership that’s due to launch in the fall, it has the potential to touch more than 10 million Canadians. Partnering with a premium brand like Aeroplan also signals to the market that Parkland is serious about this space and is therefore an investment worth looking at.

What makes Aeroplan an additionally good fit for Parkland is the fact that the latter is “all about helping people get to a destination,” White highlights. “Road trips are some of the best times families spend together. We like to think we are empowering them to do what our tagline says: make the most of every stop. At the end of the day, it’s all about the customer and whatever we can do to make their lives easier and to create some of those magical moments along the way.”

When asked what his background as a marketer does for him as a president, the former Parkland SVP of strategic marketing and innovation is quick to respond. “You can take the operator out of marketing, but you can’t make a marketer out of an operator. As a marketer, I am a customer champion, and I think that makes me a better leader. I can access my marketer’s storytelling skills and customer focus to rally the employees to get us there. That is my job.”