Topics >  Sales and Marketing >  Branding >  The History of Great Brands > 

How Fast Can This Thing Go, Anyway?

Griffith's approach to technology is based on the Kaizen technique. It's a Japanese quality-control process that asks employees involved in a task--usually manufacturing-related--to map out exactly how the task is performed, then suggest more efficient ways in which to do it. Zipcar's former CFO, Shaun Starbuck, was a big fan of the system. It's largely used in factories, but Griffith and Starbuck wanted to see if it could cut the fat off of some of Zipcar's operations. "There was a very cool opportunity here to apply the technique to a service business," Griffith says. Employees throughout the company were asked to look at the way they did things and break the process into as many small steps as possible--and then cut out the unnecessary ones. Kaizen is now used all over the company; it even keeps a full-time Kaizen instructor on the payroll. By simplifying processes from the start and replacing people with automated technology, Griffith could add customers without too much fuss.

3 Brand With Attitude. And BMWs

Griffith's mandate from the board had been to overhaul the company he inherited. But one thing that didn't need major work was Zipcar's fun, youthful image. "Robin got a lot of the branding stuff right from the beginning," says Nancy Rosenzweig, Zipcar's vice president of marketing from 2002 to 2004. "She created a hip urban edge that appealed to people who were smart and knew there was another way to think." In addition to touting the do-gooder aspect of Zipcar, Chase also created a frisky and cool identity for the company. She painted the green Zipcar logo on car doors, asked customers to suggest new names as the company added cars to its fleet, and threw plenty of parties. "Making customers feel like they have input and a stake in the game really makes them want you to succeed," Chase says. "It didn't matter if 25 people showed up to a potluck dinner. It's the 4,000 people who think, How cool--I belong to a company that has potluck dinners."

Griffith continued the casual, intimate contact with customers. The company still sends chatty e-mails about what it's up to. Last winter, it organized a movie night at a Chicago theater. The evening's theme was "Drive In, Don't Drive Out," and Chicagoans were asked to leave their old cars at the event to be donated to charity. Ten did so; when Zipcar repeated the event in Washington, 35 donated.

But Griffith was hardly shy about making other changes. Noting that the average age of Zipcar members was rising, he expanded the fleet with high-end BMWs and specific-use cars like four-wheel-drives for ski trips and pickup trucks for weekend home improvers. He opted not to display the Zipcar logo prominently on the most expensive cars, figuring that customers were using them for dates or business meetings, to impress, and wouldn't want to advertise the fact that it was an hourly rental. He also changed the rate structure. Under Chase, Zipcar charged renters by the mile and by the hour. Griffith thought the per-mile piece stressed drivers. "Every mile driven had some cost associated with it, and I felt like people, as the odometer clicked by, felt like they were in a taxicab," he says. Now Zipcars can be driven up to 180 miles a day without extra charges.

One place in which Griffith may have guessed wrong was green marketing. He was, and remains, eager to distance himself from his predecessor, often describing Chase's iteration of the company as unstructured and more concerned with changing the world than with making money. Chase chafes at that characterization. True, her original partner, Danielson, was a carbon-emissions researcher who viewed car-sharing as a way to reduce carbon emissions. But Chase insists that she was as committed to growth and profitability as she was to Zipcar's green agenda.

When Griffith arrived, he backed away from most mentions of the company's environmental benefits. "I didn't see that people were making buying decisions around green," he says. He considered abandoning the color green for Zipcar, a move his marketing chief talked him out of. Now he has no problem touting Zipcar as green. A page in each in-car guide reads "We ♥ Earth," and Zipcar's website has a page touting the company's commitment to the environment, asking people to "Imagine a world with a million fewer cars on the road." "I don't think people are going to use Zipcar because it's green, but it is an important part of the brand," Griffith says.

4 Hand Over Power. Watch Ideas Fly

The other thing Griffith inherited from Chase was her people. And that posed a problem for the new CEO. Under Chase's leadership, Zipcar was a pitch-in, we're-all-in-this-together start-up--engineers would shovel out Zipcars that were blanketed in snow, and the VP of marketing would take customer-service calls. When Griffith took over, he held a couple of fist-pumping meetings about the power of structure and metrics. His employees were less than enthusiastic.

The big breakthrough came when he put city managers in charge of their own profit and loss, and encouraged them to approach their cities as they saw fit. "We've been trying to create little entrepreneurs in each of the cities," he says. Each office assembled street teams, kids just out of college who serve as part-time marketers, cruising in their Zipcars and honking and stacking cards at local delis and retailers. (Store owners get free Zipcar memberships in return.)