At the very epicenter of American marketing, something strange is going on.<\/p>\n
A recent drive up the Joisey Turnpike revealed an interesting trend:\u00a0 hundreds of the most prominent service stations have been refitted with garish new graphics.\u00a0 A new brand has been springing up everywhere.\u00a0 Where for decades one saw Mobil\u2019s Pegasus and Exxon\u2019s Tiger, one now sees a simple red drop of oil in a ubiquitous new brand name:\u00a0 \u201cLUKOIL\u201d.\u00a0 There are so many of these stations, we asked ourselves, \u201cWho are those guys?\u201d<\/p>\n
Exxon\/Mobil is the fourth largest company in the world, the world\u2019s largest oil company, and the brand most symbolic of America\u2019s control of the world market.\u00a0 In this time of surging oil prices and profits, with the United States engaged in a war in an oil-rich region, it would seem the company would be as vibrant as ever.\u00a0 But back in 2004, as part of a highly complicated deal, Exxon\/Mobil sold several hundred stations to upstart LUKOIL.\u00a0 And as far back as 2001, LUKOIL had acquired hundreds more stations as part of its acquisition of Getty Oil.\u00a0 None of this was visible to the average consumer until 2005, when LUKOIL launched its aggressive re-branding campaign.\u00a0 There are now several thousand LUKOIL stations throughout the critical Washington-NYC corridor.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the ironic twist:\u00a0 LUKOIL is a Russian company (it\u2019s RED, get it?) that trades publicly on the London Exchange.\u00a0 Formed in 1991 from 3 Russian gas producers, LUKOIL holds the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world.\u00a0 It plans to spend $100 billion over the next 10 years, behind two initiatives.\u00a0 First, to open refineries throughout Europe, the US and China.\u00a0 Second, to crank up the marketing engine and re-brand all those stations it has been quietly buying for the past five years.<\/p>\n
The Bear is out of the bag.\u00a0 Coming soon to a station near you:\u00a0 the Russian Marketing Revolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the very epicenter of American marketing, something strange is going on. A recent drive up the Joisey Turnpike revealed an interesting trend:\u00a0 hundreds of the most prominent service stations have been refitted with garish new graphics.\u00a0 A new brand has been springing up everywhere.\u00a0 Where for decades one saw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[411,474,491,764,787],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","tag-exxonmobil","tag-gas","tag-getty","tag-lukoil","tag-marketing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}