Enhancing Parkland’s marketing agility with composable architecture

At Apply Digital, we specialize in transforming digital experiences for enterprises. Our collaboration with Parkland — a leading North American fuel distributor and retailer — demonstrates how composable architecture empowers companies to bring their customer segments into sharper focus and accelerate speed to value.

This project played a key role in Parkland’s 2025 MACH Impact Award recognition for Team of the Year — awarded to the project team or department that best demonstrates how its work has helped achieve or exceed objectives and contributed to the overall competitiveness and/or success of a company. A true acknowledgment of how a strong, flexible digital experience foundation can empower teams to work smarter, faster, and more independently.

Why composable?

Traditional monolithic systems often bind businesses to rigid architectures that are slow to adapt and difficult to scale. For a customer-focused organization like Parkland, speed, personalization, and autonomy were essential. Composable architecture, built on MACH principles — microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless — offered the flexibility needed to respond quickly to evolving market dynamics and customer expectations.

Unlike all-in-one suites that dictate workflows, composable systems offer freedom of choice. Parkland was able to assess and implement the right tools for each part of their stack, without compromising on performance. This modularity allowed the marketing team to iterate quickly and scale confidently.

At the heart of this transformation was Contentful. Already in place prior to the project, Contentful’s headless CMS architecture provided the structure and agility needed to orchestrate content across channels. Rather than starting from scratch, the Parkland team was able to build upon this strong foundation, which proved essential in achieving rapid results.

The challenge: modernizing a legacy system

Parkland’s existing loyalty and campaign management setup was limited. Campaigns often took 10-12 weeks to launch, with marketers relying heavily on external development support — even for routine changes. Real-time personalization was out of reach, and campaigns were often based on static audience segments. These constraints slowed down innovation and diluted customer engagement.

Our approach: building on a strong foundation

With Contentful already serving as the content backbone, we helped Parkland reimagine their marketing technology stack by integrating it with complementary best-in-class tools — creating a cohesive, composable platform:

• Contentful – Structured content at speed: Contentful enabled Parkland’s team to manage and deliver content consistently across digital touchpoints — from mobile apps and websites to email and in-store screens. Its flexible content modeling and API-first design meant that non-technical users could build and update content without depending on developers, significantly reducing time to market.

• Braze – Real-time customer engagement: Braze allowed Parkland to orchestrate personalized messaging across email, push, and in-app channels. Integrated with Contentful and Segment, it enabled dynamic content delivery triggered by customer behavior, along with A/B testing to continually refine performance.

• Segment – Unified customer data for smarter targeting: Segment served as the CDP, consolidating customer data from touchpoints such as the app, POS systems, website, and fuel pumps. These unified profiles powered precise segmentation and triggered relevant messaging in Braze, all while informing content strategies in Contentful.

Together, this architecture enabled Parkland to shift from a fragmented, developer-dependent model to a scalable, self-service platform for marketing.

A phased and collaborative implementation

The transformation was rolled out in phases. We began with discovery — aligning on business goals, marketing needs, and data requirements. Design and implementation followed, with hands-on collaboration across Parkland’s internal teams. Training workshops and testing ensured adoption, while a phased rollout allowed us to refine as we went.

Critical to success was cross-functional alignment. By involving marketing, product, data, and engineering early, we ensured the platform supported real-world workflows. This collaboration helped drive ownership and long-term sustainability.

We prioritized high-impact use cases in early phases to generate quick wins, build momentum, and reinforce trust in the new platform. As adoption grew, we introduced shared governance guidelines to maintain consistency and quality across teams contributing content and data.

The impact: faster campaigns, better engagement

The transformation delivered measurable results:

• Campaign development time reduced: from 10–12 weeks to 2–3 weeks

• Campaign development costs cut by: 68%

• Greater marketing autonomy: teams launched and managed campaigns without relying on external vendors

• Improved personalization: real-time data and dynamic content delivery drove more relevant, timely interactions

Between September and December 2024 alone, Parkland sent 29.2 million emails and 11.5 million push notifications — proof of the platform’s scalability and effectiveness. Most importantly, customer experiences improved. More relevant messaging led to increased engagement across loyalty channels and stronger retention.

"Before, it felt like building a rocket ship from scratch each time. Now, we're nimble. Communications take days or even hours. We can ensure the right customers get the right message at the right time. We've switched from a ‘can we do this?’ mentality to a ‘should we do this?’ mentality. And our customers are better for it."

Derek Weidl, Director of Loyalty Programs, Parkland

A partner perspective

From our perspective at Apply Digital, this project stood out for its strong collaboration and shared commitment to outcomes. Aligning stakeholders, practicing agile implementation, and putting customer value first were key to success.

It also demonstrated the power of building on existing strengths. Contentful had already been adopted by Parkland, and rather than replacing it, we amplified its impact by integrating it within a composable ecosystem. This approach helped unlock a new level of agility for the marketing team.

Working closely with partners Braze and Segment ensured we stayed aligned on roadmaps, solved challenges quickly, and delivered a cohesive experience for Parkland.

Looking ahead

With a composable foundation now firmly in place, Parkland is positioned to expand the platform’s capabilities. Future enhancements could include deeper personalization using predictive models, broader integrations across retail channels, and applying the same framework to new business units.

Opportunities also exist to explore AI-driven recommendations, advanced testing, and more sophisticated customer journey orchestration. The platform is now set up to evolve alongside the business.

Conclusion: a future-ready marketing platform

Parkland’s journey illustrates how a composable approach — grounded in MACH principles and powered by a flexible digital experience platform — can bring an organization's customer segments into clearer focus and accelerate speed to value.

The success of this initiative was recognized with a MACH Impact Award for Team of the Year, reflecting the transformation’s meaningful contribution to Parkland’s broader success.

At Apply Digital, we’re proud to have partnered on this journey. It shows what’s possible when great technology, strategic design, and great partners come together.

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