Will Avis Really Try Harder?

So another sector innovator has been snapped up by one of the traditional market players: ZipCar, the car sharing business, has been acquired by the global No.3 car rental operator, Avis.

It’s a common enough story…The young, attractive, idealistic free spirit falls for the charms of the old, slightly over-weight but fabulously wealthy plutocrat…Or as mock talk-show host Mrs Merton memorably asked: ‘So Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to short, balding millionaire Paul Daniels?’.

Many acquisitions by big, traditional corporates of values-led brands have gone before - Innocent surrendering a majority holding to Coca-Cola, Body Shop selling out to L’Oreal, Green & Black’s acquired by Cadbury but now in thrall to the less cuddly Kraft, Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream owned by Unilever, albeit as a semi-autonomous entity.

What’s of real interest for brand watchers is not the motives of the seller (cash and equity realisation for the founders or expansion via funding, distribution and access to new markets) but the motives of the acquirers and how they set about leveraging their investment.

The risk is Avis imposing its cumbersome paper based bureaucracy of car rental on the fast moving, customer friendly, technologically sophisticated and paper free ZipCar experience.

The obvious business win has to be integration – resulting in more product/service offerings for customers.

But the really big win – and the learning from the Unilever / Ben & Jerry acquisition – is perhaps what ZipCar can bring to Avis. This centres around a genuinely customer centric offer delivered by an enthusiastic team who always seem to want to make a difference to customers. If Avis can understand how to transfer this commitment to their much bigger business then it really will be the biggest prize of all. JS