A gas pump is a machine most people meet with practiced indifference. Pull in. Tap a card. Watch the numbers climb. Leave. Elaine Kanak looks at the same rectangle of metal, screen, payment reader, and hose and sees a concentrated minute of customer attention. The driver has stopped. The screen is at eye level. A store full of coffee, sandwiches, and forgotten road-trip supplies is a few steps away. In a retail world frantic for a clean signal, the forecourt has one: someone is actually there.
Kanak's phrase for it is blunt and memorable: "At the pump, you're pretty confident that there are some human eyeballs there." It sounds like an ad buyer's observation. In her hands, it becomes a product brief. Could the screen recognize loyalty? Could a driver order food while the tank fills? Could payment feel the same whether the energy arrives as gasoline, electricity, hydrogen, or compressed natural gas? Could the car itself eventually act as the wallet?
These questions sit at the center of her job as chief marketing officer of Vontier, a public industrial technology company whose products hide inside everyday movement. Its businesses serve convenience retailers, fleet operators, and auto-repair technicians. The portfolio includes Gilbarco Veeder-Root, Invenco by GVR, DRB, Driivz, ANGI, Teletrac Navman, and Matco Tools. Pumps and point-of-sale systems live beside charging software, car-wash controls, fleet telematics, and repair equipment. The customer may see a stop on the way to work. Kanak sees a stack.
A portfolio is not yet a story
Kanak took the enterprise role in October 2024 after serving as CMO of two Vontier businesses, Gilbarco Veeder-Root and Invenco by GVR. Before industrial mobility, she held senior roles at American Express and Goldman Sachs, including work around Marcus. Her public profile describes expertise in co-brand cards, lending, and premium product management. That background might look like a category jump. It is more useful to see the continuity.
Cards teach recognition, rewards, trust, and the cost of friction. Lending teaches the discipline of making an invisible system understandable. Premium products teach that the practical and emotional parts of a customer promise must arrive together. At Vontier, those lessons migrate into physical space. A payment reader has to work. A screen has to earn attention. A loyalty offer has to recognize the person without slowing the trip. The machinery changes; the demand for a coherent experience does not.
The central problem is that Vontier's capabilities grew up across separate operating companies and product lines. Customers, however, do not wake up wanting a better corporate portfolio. A convenience retailer wants more revenue, fewer compliance headaches, reliable payments, manageable labor costs, and equipment that stays online. A fleet operator wants safety and uptime. A technician wants a repair completed correctly. Kanak's marketing shift is to begin with those jobs and then assemble the relevant technologies around them.
"Marketing has the power to identify and capitalize on white space market potential, create ground-breaking thought leadership, and drive close alignment between the brains of the organization and the external world of customer needs and pain points."Elaine Kanak
This makes the marketing function sound less like the department that packages decisions and more like an interpreter inside the operating system. Kanak is building shared centers of excellence while Vontier moves from a decentralized structure toward more integrated services. Performance marketing, brand, communications, events, digital work, and customer insight can borrow from one another instead of restarting inside each business.
The forecourt learns new tricks
The gas station has long been organized around a simple sequence: fuel outside, goods inside. That line is dissolving. Foodservice gives stores a reason to compete with quick-service restaurants. Large pump screens give retailers a channel for branded content. Order-at-the-pump can move a food purchase earlier in the visit. EV charging changes dwell time. Loyalty and mobile payment pull the trip into a digital relationship before the driver even turns into the lot.
Kanak has described consumers as increasingly expecting to be recognized. They want loyalty, personalization, convenience, quick payment, and a seamless journey. Notice how little of that vocabulary belongs to heavy equipment. It comes from consumer products and software. Her contribution is to apply it without pretending the physical constraints have vanished. Outdoor screens face severe weather. Retailers have different layouts and installed equipment. Payment infrastructure has to be secure. A clean demo is not the same thing as a system that survives a busy Tuesday.
A quick stop, a familiar payment method, a useful offer, and food ready on time.
Labor, uptime, security, energy choices, compliance, inventory, and thin margins.
Dispenser, charger, point of sale, loyalty, media, car wash, cloud, and fleet data.
Why the connected result is worth more than a shelf of capable products.
At the 2025 NACS Show, Kanak pointed to an "explosion in foodvenience" and predicted that the offer would extend outside the store. Vontier was demonstrating ordering at the pump. The idea is modest enough to picture immediately: choose the pizza while the fuel flows, pick it up on the way out. Yet it requires the screen, payment, kitchen flow, point of sale, and customer promise to agree. Integration becomes tangible in the saved minutes.
Her 2026 discussions widened the frame. Trips are increasingly planned before customers get into the car. Digital convenience, food, value, and trust can determine where someone stops. AI can help reduce operating cost, improve execution, and strengthen customer relationships. Kanak's emphasis was to use technology to remove friction while keeping people central. In a labor-tight retail environment, the point is practical assistance, not a theatrical robot future.
The operator behind the marketer
Former colleagues describe a manager who pairs detail with room to move. One direct report wrote that Kanak understood her products deeply, gave her the freedom to create, stepped in when support mattered, and advocated for the team's work when they were not in the room. A former Marcus colleague called her an all-around operator who could manage complex cross-functional initiatives and still get her hands dirty.
Kanak's own version is almost a management equation: responsibility plus accountability plus autonomy produces performance. The words matter together. Autonomy without responsibility is drift. Accountability without room to decide is theater. Her stated aim in building Vontier's marketing centers of excellence is not merely to standardize output. It is to create functional alignment that gives people new learning, stretch work, and a visible career path.
"Giving great responsibility, accountability, and autonomy drives great performance and outsize results."Elaine Kanak
She is also candid about using new tools herself. Kanak has said that Copilot and ChatGPT are part of her daily management routine. Her team looks outside Vontier for ideas, studies leading B2B technology providers, watches consumer marketing, and experiments with AI. The stance is neither breathless nor defensive. A marketing organization responsible for explaining changing technology should be willing to test changing technology in its own work.
A pattern that started on campus
There is an early scene in Kanak's public record that makes the current job feel less accidental. As a Northwestern University senior, she co-led the school's Dance Marathon, a 30-hour fundraising event. In 2005 it raised $619,346, then a record. Kanak and her co-chair credited tighter committee goals, frugality, and unusually strong participation.
Her line at the time could sit inside a modern brand workshop: the mission was to make philanthropy fun and exciting, "like making it a celebration rather than this tedious thing people do to put on their resumes." It is a young leader's phrasing, playful and a little mischievous, but the operating instinct is clear. Make the desired action meaningful. Remove the sense of obligation. Give people a story they want to join. Then watch the small contributions compound.
Co-leads Northwestern's Dance Marathon; the event raises $619,346.
Attends Chicago Booth as a Kilts Marketing Fellow and honors graduate.
Builds experience across American Express, Goldman Sachs, and Marcus.
Leads marketing at Gilbarco Veeder-Root and Invenco by GVR.
Becomes Vontier's first enterprise chief marketing officer.
Chicago Booth added a formal marketing toolkit. Kanak attended from 2009 to 2011, was a James M. Kilts Marketing Fellow, co-chaired the Marketing Group, served as a class agent, and graduated with honors. Consumer finance then gave her scale and data. Industrial technology supplied a portfolio where marketing can change not only perception but also the way products are combined and sold.
Trust before points
In July 2026, Kanak published an argument about convenience-store loyalty: points matter, but trust is the base layer. That view completes the arc from premium cards to the forecourt. A program can reward a transaction. It cannot compensate indefinitely for a bad sandwich, a broken charger, an unreliable payment terminal, or an experience that varies wildly from one location to the next.
For Vontier, this makes integration more than a cross-sell strategy. Every connected part becomes evidence for or against the operator's promise. The pump screen can recognize a customer, but the store must honor the order. The charger can extend a visit, but it must work. The software can offer insight, but someone on site needs a clear action. Trust is built in those handoffs.
Kanak's assignment is still in motion. She is aligning teams, sharpening the enterprise narrative, and explaining an ecosystem that spans traditional fuel and newer forms of energy. The useful insight is not that every industrial company needs a grand transformation slogan. It is smaller and harder: start where the customer pauses, find the friction hidden in that moment, and make the machinery behind it behave like one system.
The driver may never know the name Vontier. Kanak has acknowledged as much. But if the payment works, the screen is useful, the food is ready, and the stop feels easy, the company has made itself felt. For a marketer of infrastructure, invisibility is not failure. Sometimes it is the finished product.