In the two decades since its last brand overhaul, much had changed in Hertz’s marketplace. Traditionally associated with the business traveller, the company now appealed to a wider, more diverse audience. And it needed a corporate identity that would chime with all of them. Frank Sutton reports

"We want to paint the world yellow,” beams Paula Rivera of Hertz. It’s a nice turn of phrase, certainly cuddlier than ‘Hertz craves total domination of the global car hire market’. But the point is the same, and if the 100-year old US company has bold aspirations, that’s because it’s already half way to achieving them. With 8,200 locations in almost 150 countries and approximately 30 million reservations annually, Hertz unquestionably runs with the big dogs in the world of car rental. Its brand guardians might well feel that their work over the decades has had a lot to do with this. Step into an airport arrivals hall anywhere in the world and you’d be hard-pressed not to see the yellow of Hertz within a hundred metres. And that’s the way it’s pretty much always been.

Yet in recent times the market has been evolving. The most obvious (and painful) change has been the recession. Hertz’s revenues took a hammering. But that has been par for the course right across the business travel and tourism markets. It’s been belt and braces time all round. That said, Paula Rivera traces the decision to rebrand to before the global economy went into freefall. “We hadn’t updated our logo in approximately 20 years. We wanted to make it more modern, a little more edgy, but without losing the connection to the old iconic logo that people knew.”

It wasn’t just a question of it being time for a refresh though. Hertz had changed a lot in recent years, and this needed to be reflected. For example, new products and services had been introduced to ease the process of renting, such as an iPhone app.

Richard Ford, executive creative director at Landor New York, and the brains behind the new logo backs this up. “The look of Hertz was dated,” he says with typical candour, before going on to reveal even more. Time to get demographic. “The mix of business for Hertz, if not the entire category, had shifted from business to leisure. That brings into play a second factor – which is a shift to a greater proportion of women customers.

“A big problem was the preponderance of the use of black. When customers came to Hertz, the canopies were black, the buildings were black. That created a dark, masculine feel. And in particular we know from working in gas stations that women are not attracted to dark colours. It also made it harder to attract younger people.”

Ford isn’t done there though. As well as the old branding looking outdated, it was also difficult for marketing people to use. “If you look at the old type it’s very solid, it relies on the big drop shadow. It’s hard because you have this heavyweight slab of typography to try to manage.

“The identity was like a hundred pound weight. It was a beast. It needed to be lightened up in terms of both colour and weight. These days not many corporations rely on that kind of drop shadow.”

Of course different markets respond to different things. Colours, fonts, images, strap-lines – they can all have different resonances in different continents. Ford is well aware of this. As is Landor itself, having plenty of experience in the travel industry, from airlines to the likes of Alamo and Europcar.

However, the Hertz project was not about identifying and communicating cultural difference. “This programme was always intended to focus mainly on core identity and be worldwide. It was not one that was really focused on difference around the world,” says Ford. “It was about revitalising the core not dealing with localisation.”

With the goals of the rebrand in place the Landor team got to work. “There wasn’t an enormous emphasis on research,” explains Ford. This was largely due to the near ubiquity of the Hertz brand; a brand that almost everybody already recognised. “It’s often easier when you’ve got some known equities to work with. You know what’s positive and what’s negative.”

Instead the early focus was on working with Hertz to uncover the central ideas that lie behind the brand, that unify it. It became clear that for Hertz the key was to do with exceeding expectations – being competitive while at the same time making sure customers were really enjoying their rental experience.

Paula Rivera is keen to add to this. “It was about delivering joy. We were trying to turn renting a car into an experience. Customers were already aware of our ‘speed, service, selection’ messages. But we wanted to make it more of an emotional connection.” After all, adds Ford: “It’s about giving people freedom, the freedom to travel.”

The new visual identity isn’t a radical departure from the old. Nor of course was it ever intended to be. Instead the job was about giving it a certain cleanness, a lightness of feel and colour, to be more attractive to the changing nature of the Hertz stakeholder base.

Richard Ford: “Very obviously what emerged was that the key thrust of this work was this business of reversing the emphasis from black dominant to yellow dominant. Yellow is a signature colour for Hertz, against competitors who use greens, blues, reds.”

Paula Rivera takes up the description. “The previous logo had the yellow letters shadowed in black. Now we’re owning the colour yellow so you see the black letters surrounded by a yellow box.”

“Getting rid of the drop shadow was a nice clean reversal of the whole colour usage,” says Ford. “And by making that flip, the new type fits more cleanly on a yellow background. We also made the yellow a little darker, less lemon, to warm it up and make it more friendly and energetic.”

The new logo is only one part of a wider comms push. A new advertising campaign with the tagline ‘journey on’ recently launched, and emphasises this notion that renting from Hertz is an experience and not just a transaction, albeit a speedy and efficient one. (Eagle-eyed cinema goers might also have spotted a cameo appearance by Hertz in the George Clooney film Up In The Air. He played a man whose life was dominated by business travel. No prizes for guessing who he rented cars from.)

The roll-out will also see signage, uniforms and locations given a makeover to show off the new branding. Though in a business as big as Hertz, this kind of thing takes time. “You know what it is like for big corporations,” says Richard Ford. “They spend money every day on replacing a sign here, a location there. They’re always doing something, so Hertz are taking advantage of that to roll the new brand out in an economical way.”

In the meantime however another important part of the rebrand process has come to the fore. Whereas many organisations think only in terms of their external audiences when rebranding, Hertz also sees the value of communicating with employees. “We have made a concerted effort to make sure our employees are aware of what we are doing, to make sure they were part of it. As we were getting ready to announce the rebrand we were careful to ensure our employees were up to speed,” explains Paula Rivera.

But Hertz’s efforts went further than these useful, if fairly standard, internal comms tactics. “We encouraged managers to have rebranding parties at branches. We also created an intranet site to let employees post pictures of their personal journeys.”

Although it’s too early to come to a definitive assessment of how the new brand identity is being received out in the real world, Richard Ford is keen to point within.

Continuing Rivera’s theme, his final point is about the importance a rebrand plays in communicating something positive to audiences other than just customers. “As a company the recession had made Hertz feel a bit down and pretty beaten up in the marketplace. This project has helped them get their head up again and feel good about their brand.” 

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