Hertz - Social media Analysis

IIn August of 2017, Hertz, the second largest car rental company in the US, was blindsided by the solar eclipse. Hertz had used this unusual event as part of a marketing campaign, encouraging customers to rent cars so they could travel to the eclipse’s line of totality. Unfortunately, they underestimated the demand and overbooked their fleet, forcing the company to cancel reservations. This led to significant backlash from furious customers, many of whom expressed their displeasure on social media. The negative response prompted Buzzfeed to publish an article about the cancelled reservations, diminishing the company’s reputation even further.

As part of the Measuring Social Media Analytics class taught by Ari Lightman, Professor of Digital Media and Marketing, I worked on a team tasked with using social media to find a way to prevent Hertz from having similar problems again in the future. Over the course of the semester, we worked with the Senior Director of Social Media & Content Strategy in addition to a number of other Hertz employees at the corporate level and in managerial roles at branch locations to develop a solution to meet their needs.

Unlike holidays and professional sporting events, which can be planned for well in advance, unusual occurrences like the solar eclipse are obviously less predictable. However, using the eclipse as a case study, our team determined that there was a correlation between social chatter data about the event and demand for cars. If Hertz would have been aware of this chatter, that data could have been used to predict rental demand early enough to allow for adequate preparation. With this knowledge, our team developed a tool that would predict event-based demand surges by incorporating signals derived from social media chatter to provide Hertz time to manage its supply. Our predictive dashboard allowed branch managers to select a date range and a radius around their chosen local GPS coordinate. The dashboard would then generate a heat map of the number of posted social media events happening in that date range in their area, including the number of people attending. Combining this social data with traditional data, such as historical and current bookings, helped Hertz to improve their operational efficiency.