Inside 7-Eleven’s retail media network

7-Eleven Inc. has been at the forefront of convenience store innovation since it was founded in Dallas almost 100 years ago — from 24/7 operations to self-serve coffee to iconic brands like the Big Gulp, and even dill pickle-flavored Slurpees.

“As you might imagine, it was a limited-time offering,” Marissa Jarratt, chief marketing and sustainability officer at 7-Eleven Inc., said of her favorite Slurpee flavor during a keynote session at NRF 2024: Retail’s Big Show.  “A pretty interesting flavor. The Hawaiian pizza flavor is another one that honestly sounds weird but it tastes great, and is part of the broader innovation DNA of 7-Eleven.”

Jarratt joined 7-Eleven four years ago to help lead the transformation of the marketing function and leverage customer data to create a better experience for the 12 million customers who shop at the convenience store daily, she told Lauren Wiener, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group.

Fueling innovation with data

The key to this transformation is 7-Eleven’s Immediate Consumption Ecosystem, made up of data insights and measurement tools — awareness, trial and conversion, inspiration, amplification and customer engagement, which includes 7-Eleven’s newest marketing tool, Gulp Media.

“I think it’s important for everyone to understand that we’ve built these tools so that we can leverage them internally to drive our business and to create a great customer experience,” Jarratt said.

Launched in October 2022, Gulp Media is a retail media network that deploys advertising and messaging through social, display and connected TV ads throughout the store. “It’s an opportunity to influence the shopper at the point of purchase so there’s a lot of power,” Jarratt said.

7-Eleven is already using Gulp Media to promote its own proprietary brands as well as partner brands like C4 energy drinks. The results of the C4 product trial campaign were impressive: 33% of buyers were new to the brand, 7.5% of buyers were new to the category and the brand saw a 7% sales lift.

The C4 campaign, as well as others like it, uses the full complement of marketing tools that Jarratt’s team has developed, including first-party data from the brand’s C-Shopper platform, which provides demographic and purchasing behavior data.

Harnessing the power of loyalty

For zero-party data including motivations, attitudes and beliefs, the Gulp Media team taps into 7-Eleven’s loyalty database, the Brain Freeze Collective.

“Our loyalty members, our most loyal members, are shopping our stores more than once a day. That is a high degree of engagement and connection and commitment to the brand,” Jarratt said. “So, we want to make sure that our offering has all the functional attributes and benefits … of what you would expect in a retail media network, but that it also communicates more than that. It communicates the power and the potential of the brand, and it reflects the connectivity that our customers have with this brand."

Last summer, 7-Eleven put its ICE marketing tools behind driving more sales of Slurpees. Jarratt’s team started with C-Shopper data to understand “different shopper dynamics, purchase dynamics by market, area, region, flavor, et cetera, that we could tease apart to understand opportunities to accelerate growth and opportunities to improve growth.”

Gulp Media then developed several conceptual ideas for a campaign and tested those with the Brain Freeze Collective to narrow down messaging. Finally, Gulp Media tested and launched a collaboration with Los Angeles jewelry designer King Ice. The end result? “The unit sales growth with Slurpees last summer was the highest we’ve seen in years,” Jarratt said.

Coming soon to a store near you

The next iteration of Gulp Media is in the works, Jarratt said. Gulp Radio is an in-store radio network currently in 2,000 7-Eleven stores. Over the next year, it will be scaled to the entire North American store network of 13,000 stores; when completed, Gulp Radio will be the largest radio station in the United States.

“Going back to the concept of immediate consumption and impulse purchase, in our stores, to be able to influence customers at the point of purchase is really the most effective way to drive growth,” Jarratt said. “And so, bringing this into the stores — we’ve already seen in our beta test — we think will unleash a new level, an s-level of growth, both with our proprietary businesses as well as with our manufacturing partners.”