Actively managing performance across multiple markets

The brief

Hertz Europe car rental is a major travel sector business with over 4m vehicle rentals per year across Europe.  With a mixture of ‘corporately owned’ markets including the big five – UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain; plus independent franchised markets including Sweden, Portugal, Austria the need for leadership is clear, but the reality across diverse markets and businesses is a real challenge.

Hertz was operating programmes of customer membership across Europe, covering over 40 markets but with most customers living in the major European markets.  Customer members accounted for over 25% of all revenues, from one in 10 customers actually buying products.

Strategy

An early focus on setting and agreeing a clear strategy had focussed the business on treating customers differently according to their value to the business, the products they were buying, and according to the level of relationship between the customer and the business.

So with a clear strategy in place, the next priority was to drive business performance improvement in line with the strategy.  We set out to build a performance management mindset which would shift the culture, so that local management staff would live and breathe their numbers.

Actions

Business performance reporting can be dry and detailed.  Businesses can generate report after report, drowning managers in numbers.   Measuring your marketing performance meaningfully is harder work.

So we thought carefully about the numbers that matter, building a set of KPIs then engaging local market management to win their support for the new dashboard format.  The next stage was to propose targets for each market backed up with a convincing logic – not just ‘last year +10%’.

After agreement of KPIs and targets, we established a rigorous but informal monthly review process through market by market conference calls.  Every month we’d review the numbers – but importantly we’d be sure to come to actionable conclusions.

After 3 months new processes were in place across twenty European markets.  After 6 months we’d refined the new system to highlight good and bad performance, and through a healthy spirit of competition, we started to drive performance growth.

The big difference

With growth rates of up to +35% by market, high performers started to drag low performers along with them.  Revenue growth soon followed.  After 12 months Hertz rolled out the new system globally.  A strong US corporate culture taking best practice in performance management from Europe.

Click here to read more about our thinking in measuring marketing performance.

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