The CEO of Hertz recently overcommitted his company to purchase EVs, well beyond what his company and market could absorb, and the company sold a bunch of them at a loss.
The CEO probably misread his market in that he does local rentals, and the Teslas are more suited to distances. Ford is doing a smaller EV that might be better suited to local rentals, but it won’t be here until 2026 or so.
These problems aren’t unique to Hertz: Bud Lite and Target made spectacular miscues in reading their core markets, with disastrous results. Both have fixed the offending ads, but at considerable cost in reestablishing their brands in customers’ minds.
Much of current advertising is more dedicated to being cute than reinforcing a company’s product or service message, and having been an account executive, there’s constant temptation to do what’s ‘current’ rather than what makes sense.
We are currently doing a project for my college, Antioch, designed to give entrepreneurs the tools to correctly define and read their market from a customer viewpoint. The customer viewpoint is important, because many entrepreneurs think that, just because they and their friends think an idea is cool, that the market will agree.
We have a similar business startup course in the Small Business Sucess School, www.bizsucess.school, which we’d commend to you. Better to spend $87 and avoid mistakes that could cost thousands.