ZIPCAR CASE: Influencing customer behavior

The case is about a car rental service company Zipcar and the situation of dilemma faced between two
of its customers Anita Karr and Sal Fishman in the decision of picking up and dropping off the car.
Zipcar offered a unique a type of car rental providing, fast and feasible service to its customers. In this
service, one car could be shared by consecutively by numerous people as per the time which could be in
hours, days or weeks. Due to this it created a situation of dependency on the previous customer to
receive the car. Zipcar was mostly used by people/groups who don’t want to own a car however needed
a secondary car which served a purpose of conveyance or other than that, but in a more convenient and
cheaper way. It does so by offering feasibility by cutting the cost of staff and operational infrastructure
internally. This type of service also attracted people who believed that expenses on insurance, gas and
parking were futile.

The business model is such that there could instances where a customer could be uncertain about
getting the delivery of the car from the previous customer due to unavoidable and unprecedented
circumstances and at the same time it could cost customers their valuable time. A similar thing
happened with Anita and Sal in this case where Anita couldn’t find the car at her pickup point and she
was running out of time and Sal couldn’t communicate about the delay to Zipcar.