BP has appointed former Lidl UK marketing director Claire Farrant as its new VP marketing for the mobility and convenience retail business in Europe.
Reporting to Tracey Clements, SVP mobility and convenience retail Europe, Farrant will lead the evolution of a transformative marketing strategy to drive growth. She will focus on enhancing customer engagement, loyalty and digital transformation across BP’s European retail business, while leveraging strategic partnerships for sustained growth.
Farrant is described as a seasoned retail marketer, with a decade-long career in senior roles at Tesco before joining Lidl in 2015 as marketing director, contributing to the retailer’s impressive market share growth and move into the UK’s ‘big six supermarkets’. Her leadership role at Lidl involved streamlining brand consistency and optimising marketing costs across 32 markets, launching and leading the marketing strategy for Lidl’s own reward programme Lidl Plus, while developing talent and growth in her team.
Farrant’s appointment is part of a wider drive by BP to invest in its convenience retail proposition, which includes the recent appointment of Joanne Hall from Sainsburys as its UK retail operations director and Teresa Lindley from Waitrose as UK trading director.
Tracey Clements said: “We are delighted to welcome Claire to BP. Her exceptional leadership and proven track record of driving growth in the competitive supermarket sector make her a valuable addition to our team. Claire’s arrival comes at a pivotal moment as we evolve our marketing strategy to align our convenience retail offering with changing consumer behaviour on the roadside.”
Farrant said: “I’m thrilled to join BP at such an exciting time in its retail transformation. I’m looking forward to working closely with the team to develop and implement a strong marketing strategy across our nine European markets. We’re putting the customer at the very heart of everything we do, focusing on growing our brilliant loyalty programmes and delivering an outstanding, convenient retail experience.”
Convenience is one of BP’s five strategic transition growth engines, along with EV charging, hydrogen, bioenergy, and renewables and power. These are the areas that BP is investing in to help accelerate its transition into an integrated energy company. Between 2023-2030 BP aims for around half of its cumulative $55-65 billion transition growth engine investment to go into convenience, bioenergy and EV charging. By 2030 we’re aiming to double convenience gross margin, with 10% year-on-year growth, and increase the number of strategic convenience sites globally to more than 3,500.
