A Call to Action: Better Measures of Marketing Productivity
By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer
Last month, we identified the Productivity Conundrum: While improved marketing effectiveness is our goal, quantifying effectiveness is difficult given its role as an adjacency to goods and services, rather than to their production.
Still, there are some possible steps we can take to develop better measures of marketing productivity. This month, we will look at two of them.
The first approach is summarized by Jagdish Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia, who state that any measure of productivity improvement for a prospective marketing initiative must include the value of the effort (both customer acquisition and retention).
Customer Acquisition and Retention
The measure for acquiring customers consists of the revenue attributable to marketing actions that bring in new customers, divided by the costs of those actions, adjusted by a Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI). The measure of customer retention calls for changing the ratio of revenue/cost for existing customers by a Customer Loyalty Index (CLI), which addresses customer “churn.”
Managers of Work Truck Fleets: Is Renewable Diesel in Your Future?
By Mark Boada, Senior Editor
Unless you operate on the West Coast, you may not be aware of an environmental wonder fuel called “renewable diesel.” But if you have diesels in your work truck fleet and operate anywhere else in the U.S. or Canada, and particularly off road, someday it may be your fuel of choice, if there’s enough of it.
Right off the bat, it’s important to know that renewable diesel is not biodiesel. Both are made from animal fats or vegetable oils, via different processes that give them different chemical properties. The basic difference is that biodiesel retains the oxygen found in its source materials, while the process used to make renewable diesel removes the oxygen and infuses the fuel with hydrogen.
While a relatively simple difference, the results are dramatic: RD burns far more cleanly than any other type of diesel fuel, including ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) and BD. A 2015 study by the California Environmental Protection Agency concluded that renewable diesel generates about 30% less particulate matter emissions, 5% less total hydrocarbons and 10% less nitrogen oxides than ULSD, the latter being even slightly less than biodiesel.
Renewable diesel offers fleet operators another advantage. READ MORE
Sixt Aligns Sales Structure
Sixt bundles all products in the Corporate Customer segment to systematically expand digitalization
- Vinzenz Pflanz takes over direction of the newly created Group Sales division
- Oliver Popkowitz takes over direction of the SME & Digital Sales division
- Both divisions report directly to Chief Sales Officer Konstantin Sixt
Sixt is aligning its sales structure to meet its corporate clients’ changing mobility needs. All Group products, for instance, including car rental, RideHailing, leasing, fleet management and innovative mobility products, are to be bundled and distributed to corporate customers under unified management.
How Many Miles Does it Take to Build a Better Driver?
Although Waymo's test fleet has logged 5 million miles driving in autonomous mode on public roads, it still may be far from what it needs to do.
A 2016 study by RAND Corp determined that demonstrating the reliability of autonomous vehicle technology to handle anything that could happen on public roads, in terms of reducing traffic fatalities and injuries, could require hundreds of millions or even hundreds of billions of test miles.
“They do have a meaningful lead – nobody else comes close to the millions of miles Waymo has driven on roads over the past decade,” said Nidhi Kalra, a San Francisco-based RAND scientist who was the lead author of the 2016 report. “It means they are finding the rarer and trickier situations and learning more and more. There’s just no true substitute for this.”
Read the article at Forbes.
Will Your Car Know What You Are Thinking?
At Nuance Communications’ Drive Lab in Farmington Hills, you will hear terms like “cognitive arbitrator” and “gaze detection” as engineers take voice recognition into new areas.
By creating a system that links the ability to recognize spoken commands to gaze detection, the driver will be able to ask about signs, businesses and attractions along the road and receive suggestions based on his or her preferences.
“The idea is to be able to make anything a designer can draw,” said Bob Kinney, Faurecia vice president of engineering and R&D.
Read the article at Detroit Free Press.
