National Car Rental is the largest car rental company in the UK with a fleet of over 40,000 and more than 150 branches. When combined with sister brands Alamo Rent-a-Car, Europcar and Guy Salmon, the group makes up one of the world’s largest car rental companies.
National currently uses its own database of business customers and prospects to drive its call centre and direct mail activities in the UK. Issues with data quality and the difficulty in selecting accurate targeted lists from external data suppliers prompted National to contact Market Location with regards to its future business-to-business data strategy.

To begin, Market Location took in the National and Guy Salmon customer and prospect files and matched them to the Market Location Database of 2.3 million UK businesses. The files were then put through a cleansing and enhancement process, which included the identification of duplicate and gone away records. Market Location was then able to add value to the remaining National records, by enhancing with data elements such as SIC codes, market sector codes and employee numbers. National then used these variables for segmentation and profiling, and to carry out its existing direct marketing activities to customers and prospects.

National has a robust credit checking procedure for all new accounts and therefore it was important that potentially financially insecure companies were removed from its marketing activities. Using Market Location’s Risk Locator product, which identifies minimal, low, average and high-risk businesses, the high-risk businesses were flagged on the National database to allow suppression from future campaigns. Market Location also excluded this variable on any new prospect data supplied.