Terrible Herbst's Annual Gas4Life Promotion Gets a Boost From Suggestive Selling Technology

LAS VEGAS — Terrible Herbst Inc. has completed its most successful annual Gas4Life promotion yet by leveraging Gilbarco Veeder-Root's Impulse countertop merchandising solution to increase participation and engagement.

This also significantly boosted store merchandise revenues, according to the company.

During the 90-day game of chance promotion, customers could purchase featured store items to receive a special game code on their receipts to use online at the Gas4Life drawing site. This would give them the chance to win major prizes, such as cars, beer for a year or gas for a lifetime. Players could also instantly win prizes at the checkout by spinning a video-based prize wheel that would rotate and stop on prizes like food, beverages or candy.

The Impulse platform, which is a basket-based, suggestive-selling solution that uses sophisticated, behind-the-scenes technology to display relevant and colorful offers, games and surveys to the customer before, during and after check out, hosted the instant-win portion of the promotion on the interactive Spin2Win video wheel.

"We used to use scratch-off cards to provide the instant-win portion of our annual Gas4Life promotion," said Mark Walters, Terrible Herbst vice president of sales and marketing. "There's a lot more manual work involved with scratch cards, given the record keeping and distribution. Plus, there's the printing of the cards. Impulse saved us over $40,000 just in scratch cards which we could put back into the promotion. The colorful graphics and lure of Impulse's Spin2Win interactivity simply made it easier and more fun for customers to participate.

"This year's Gas4Life promotion is our most successful promotion to date," Walters said. "Fun and innovative ideas to engage and entertain customers are key to driving in-store sales and retaining loyalty. But the Impulse technology really brought the Spin2Win portion of the promotion concept to life. People like instant gratification and Impulse helped us leverage that desire. The incremental sale of in-store items was significant."

Terrible Herbst will continue to use Impulse as a business strategy to increase sales and to learn how to effectively engage customers, the company stated.

"Leading c-store retailers like Terrible Herbst are setting new trends in c-store merchandising by leveraging the latest technology," said Mark Williams, vice president of marketing, Gilbarco. "They are using Impulse to increase sales and grow business, but also to help drive customer loyalty."

Las Vegas-based Terrible Herbst operates more than 150 c-stores, car washes and oil change stations across Nevada, California, Arizona and Utah.