Audio: Star Oil CEO explains how company rose to market leadership through quality, price, and customer trust

The Chief Executive Officer of Star Oil Ghana, Philip Tieku, has revealed the strategic decisions that propelled the company to become one of the market leaders in the petroleum sector, emphasizing a balanced focus on price, quality, and customer satisfaction.

Speaking in an interview, Mr. Tieku said Star Oil’s current position is the result of deliberate planning and learning from global industry experiences, particularly from the United Kingdom’s oil market in the 1970s, where several companies collapsed following price regulation.

“We decided to look at what happened in the UK market when they went price regulation in the 1970s and noticed that a lot of oil companies collapsed because of the fierce competition and because of that, we knew that if we were going to survive this market post price regulation, we needed to do more than just compete on price.”

He noted that while pricing attracts customers, maintaining quality and integrity keeps them loyal.

”Price was always going to be a factor that allowed a customer to come to you to sample. But if the customer comes and there are quality issues, the customer is not coming back and their word of mouth could destroy your brand.”

“When we decided to go on price, we were actually latecomers to the price game in Ghana. Until July 2021, Star Oil priced its products almost at the same level as the main players, but behind the scenes, we were building systems to reduce costs and leakages.”

According to him, Star Oil’s approach was designed to ensure long-term sustainability rather than short-term market gains. He attributed Star Oil’s current market leadership to the company’s focus on fixing not only pricing but also quality, quantity, and customer relationships.

“You can try all the marketing gimmicks, but when you get a competitor, who is affordable, who does all the things that have to be done to give you quality products, and also putting the controls to ensure customers are not cheated, you are going to find it very difficult to differentiate your product from the market, which is is beginning to happen in Ghana.

“The reason Starwell is the market leader today is because we fixed not just price, we fixed quality, we fixed quantity, and we also fixed our interaction with customers and these are all tangible things you can see.

Source: Elvisanokyenews.net