• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, June 24, 2013

Carol Jones, director of insights and intelligence marketing communications for Enterprise Holdings, started her career at the agencies before moving to the client side of advertising.  At Enterprise, which owns Enterprise, National and Alamo brands, she forged a new role in research and analytics. In my interview with her, Carol talks about such subjects as the difference between agency and client marketing and research, and Enterprise Holdings and its unique value proposition in the consumer car rental market.

Below is an excerpt from the interview. The complete videos can be seen here.

CW: What type of research do you conduct on your consumer?

CJ: We actually do quite a bit of different types of research. We’ve been doing a brand health tracking study since 1989, which was the first year that we were on television, so that has a long history of trend-able data.

We also conduct a couple of communities that are about a year and a half to two years old -- one for our Enterprise brand and one for our National brand. We have groups of highly engaged consumers -- there are about 500 in each community -- whom we talk to on a weekly basis. We ask a range of questions from rental behavior to what they like about a particular advertising piece that we are developing. We will send them out on assignments, and as they travel on the course of their regular business or leisure travel they will be our eyes and ears. It has really been a very fruitful way for us to gain consumer and market insights.

Then we will also do other types of research. We do advertising copy testing and we do a lot of focus group work. We’ve done some competitive work talking to competitive customers to understand why they have loyalty to one brand or another. We want to understand shopping behavior and booking behavior. We do a lot of market landscape studies. Most recently I have been doing a fair amount of primary and secondary work in Europe. We want to understand that landscape because it is different in many respects from the U.S. and so we don’t want to apply our assumptions about the U.S. blindly into the European market when in fact it is quite different in many ways. We really do a lot of varied types of research.

CW: Do you see a distinct difference between the Enterprise brands of car services and your competitive set?

CJ: We absolutely do. All companies are out there to create a point of difference, but the Enterprise brand is so unique. And that is not just our point of view: We hear that from our consumers all the time. We have a very unique hiring model and customer experience model and we hear that played back to us all the time. We know our customers love the Enterprise experience.

That being said, there are a lot of customers who prefer a different model. That is more the business renter who is short on time and wants little to no employee interaction whatsoever. And so what we have done is created three brands to own their own space and their own segments of the market. For National which is the business travelers' brand, there is very little interaction. Our customers can go straight to the car and get off the lot which is exactly what they want. For Enterprise it is more of a touchy-feely situation, because more of those renters are infrequent renters and they need the confidence and comfort of being walked through the experience a little more. And Alamo is our leisure brand, and those customers are looking for something very different. While some think this is a commodity category, there are real differences between brands.