How Valvoline Shifted Marketing Gears When It Became A Pure-Play Retail Brand | AdExchanger

"Valvoline is a 160-year-old brand that's still best known for its off-the-shelf car oil and machine lubrication products. But did you know the company doesn't even own that business line anymore? Valvoline sold it in 2022 to Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state oil and investment conglomerate. Valvoline now licenses its name to Aramco, and itself operates entirely as a brick-and-mortar retail business for oil change services."

"For one, Lestan said, the old Valvoline business could take a far more holistic and national branding approach to its marketing, where "the halo you get from the product and the service work in concert." The idea was to be ubiquitous and remain top-of-mind for people when their car might need a tune-up. Nowadays, "it's all about driving traffic to our stores," Lestan said, and the brand has "right-sized" its marketing for that use case."

Valvoline sold its off-the-shelf motor oil and lubrication products business to Aramco in 2022 and now licenses the Valvoline name while operating exclusively as a brick-and-mortar oil-change retailer. The company pivoted from national, product-led branding to marketing focused on driving traffic to physical stores, reallocating and right-sizing budgets accordingly. Marketing strategy now emphasizes local execution and store-level performance rather than broad halo effects. A media-mix-modeling review was conducted to reweight channels and incorporate geography-driven analysis, treating market-by-market differences as a central input for media allocation and local marketing tactics.

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