Alexander Pope was born an only child to Alexander and Edith Pope in the Spring of 1688. The elder Pope, a linen-draper and recent convert to Catholicism, soon moved his family from London to Binfield, Berkshire in the face of repressive, anti-Catholic legislation from Parliament. Described by his biographer, John Spence, as “a child of a particularly sweet temper,” and with a voice so melodious as to be nicknamed the “Little Nightingale,” the child Pope bears little resemblance to the irascible and outspoken moralist of the later poems. Though barred from attending public school or university because of his religion, Pope was eager to achieve and hence, largely self-educated. He taught himself French, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and read widely, discovering Homer at the precocious age of six.

At twelve, Pope composed his earliest extant work, Ode to Solitude; the same year saw the onset of the debilitating bone deformity that plagued Pope until the end of his life. Originally attributed to the severity of his studies, the illness is now commonly accepted as Pott’s disease, a form of tuberculosis affecting the spine that stunted his growth—Pope’s height never exceeded four and a half feet—and rendered him hunchbacked, asthmatic, frail, and prone to violent headaches. His physical appearance made him an easy target for his many literary enemies in later years, who referred to the poet as a “hump-backed toad.” Pope’s Pastorals, which he claimed to have written at sixteen, were published in Jacob Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies of 1710 and brought him swift recognition. An Essay on Criticism, published anonymously the year after, established the heroic couplet as Pope’s principal measure. It included the famous line “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” The poem was said to be a response to an ongoing debate on the question of whether poetry should be natural, or written according to predetermined artificial rules inherited from the classical past. It, attracted the attention of Jonathan Swift and John Gay, who became Pope’s lifelong friends and collaborators. Together they formed the Scriblerus Club, a congregation of writers endeavoring to satirize ignorance and poor taste through the invented figure of Martinus Scriblerus, who served as a precursor to the dunces in Pope’s late masterpiece, the Dunciad.

1712 saw the first appearance of the The Rape of the Lock, Pope’s best-known work and the one that secured his fame. Its mundane subject—the true account of a squabble between two prominent Catholic families over the theft of a lock of hair—is transformed by Pope into a mock-heroic send-up of classical epic poetry. It originated from a quarrel between two families with whom Pope was acquainted. The cause was not very small − the 7th Lord Petre cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor’s hair, and kept it as a trophy. Although Pope did not admit it, the title of the work was most likely influenced by Alessandro Tassoni’s mock-epic The Rape of the Bucket, from 1622.

Turning from satire to scholarship, Pope in 1713 began work on his six-volume translation of Homer’s Iliad. He arranged for the work to be available by subscription, with a single volume being released each year for six years, a model that garnered Pope enough money to be able to live off his work alone, one of the few English poets in history to have been able to do so.

In 1719, following the death of his father, Pope moved to an estate at Twickenham, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Here he constructed his famous grotto. The celebrated grotto was, in fact, an imaginative method of linking the riverside gardens with the gardens which lay on the other side of the road leading from Twickenham to Teddington. Encouraged by the success of the Iliad, Pope went on to translate the Odyssey— which he brought out under the same subscription model as the Iliad—and to compile a heavily-criticized edition of Shakespeare, in which Pope “corrected” the Bard’s meter and made several alterations to the text, while leaving corruptions in earlier editions intact.

In addition to his translation of the “Odyssey,” which he completed with Broome and Fenton in 1726, Pope published “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” and the “Epistle of Eloïsa to Abelard” in 1717. Also, in 1725, he published an annotated edition of William Shakespeare.
Other works include: “Essay on Man” (1715),”Epistles” (1732- 34), four “Moral Essays,” and other epistles, all of which explore the philosophy and metaphysics. Pope’s uprightness had everything to do with his artistic merit. He wrote satire in the service of virtue – not simply self-defense.

Why are kids so outrageously bad at gratitude? While it is true that some children can respond by some degree to diligent upbringing, and can on occasion manage something close to gratitude, most children seem innately predisposed to a level of ingratitude that borders on the infuriating. Between the ages of about four and twelve, children are near impossible to train to say thank you as though they mean it, when given a gift. When they get into their teens, their gratitude to their parents usually manifests as seething resentment, a desire to be socially disassociated from their parents, and a reminder to their parents that they never asked to be born.

In the early years, before a child can speak, he is totally dependent on adults to care for him. He demands food by crying, yelling and screaming, and he demands his every other need attended to by similar methods. The usual reward for attending to these needs is that the screaming stops. Gratitude at this age one would not expect to find. Later on, however, one might expect children to develop excellent skills at gratitude, for several reasons.

Between the ages of four and ten (very roughly), a child is still largely dependent on adults to survive and thrive. In these years, he will depend steadily less on his own parents, and will interact more and more with people from other families. In these formative years, an ability to win people over will be a great asset. Gifts from uncles and aunts may be forthcoming, and popularity amongst his peers could set him up well for adulthood. In order to stay liked by the child’s parents, and in order to impress everyone with their generosity, non-relatives might care for, gift, and teach a child. Cuteness seems to be important in children. Adults have an innate weakness for it. It can be very difficult to remain angry with a cute child, and most children are blessed with some degree of it.

My explanation for the ingratitude of children is not a cheery one. I suspect that children benefit most consistently from a general policy of expecting gifts, demanding gifts, being self-centred, stubbornness, and threatening to throw tantrums, and that an instinct for gratitude would conflict with this. That children do benefit from “bad” behaviour is shown by the fact that they do behave badly. We know from our experience of life, that parents do continue to feed and clothe ungrateful children, and to love them and come to their aid even after the traumatic teenage years. The instincts of parents are strong enough to endure the bad behaviour of children, and therefore adults have to endure, because children have evolved to exploit this fact. The genes of parents are obsolete. The genes that matter are those of children. A child is a selfish being, which has evolved to exploit the parental generation and milk it for all it can get.

Gratitude would of course often be useful to a child, but evolution plays the odds. If ingratitude nets a child 100 favours a week, and gratitude would net 20, while losing 40 of those gained by emotions incompatible with gratitude, then the casualty is gratitude. If the costs are greater than the benefits, a trait will not evolve. Children with an innate predisposition to be grateful will be out-competed by the ungrateful swines we see in the world today.

If this were the whole truth, however, then we would expect never to see any glimmerings of gratitude in any child. The world would be populated by ungrateful children who grew into ungrateful adults. Fortunately for us, gratitude is something which is useful for an adult, and it is a skill which has to be learned. In adulthood, we cannot expect other people to help us out all the time. Eventually our parents die, and we must fend for ourselves, and strike deals with those around us. We have little respect for “spongers” – people who take from others all the time and give nothing. As adults, we cannot get pieces of cake by threatening to hold our breath until we pass out. We must learn some gratitude. If the adult is to be any good at this useful skill, it pays to get some practice in before it is needed all the time.

All people are not the same, and we would expect some people to start practising courtesy and gratitude earlier than others. The most efficient way to be is probably to have an ability to learn gratitude quickly, but to suppress the actual learning of gratitude until the moment when ingratitude stops being beneficial. We might expect socially talented but ungrateful teenagers to learn gratitude double-quick soon after they storm out of their parents’ cosy semi-detached house, and get a room in a shared flat in a dodgy part of town. Interestingly enough, it seems that this is precisely what happens, but with one refinement: whereas these young adults become skilled at being grateful to most of the people they meet, they retain an ingratitude towards their parents. When dealing with someone who loves one unconditionally, it pays to exploit this and to remain demanding. Most co-operation, most love, is conditional upon reasonable behaviour in return.

If I am right, then I would predict that children who start showing gratitude later in life, might actually be more socially talented than those who start practising this skill earlier. The ability to recognise when it is time to get grateful, and the ability to master this new art quickly, is something that a person might be born with. For those less perceptive, and less good at acting, starting younger might be advisable.

We now come to the second part of our journey under the sea. The first ended with the moving scene in the coral cemetery which left a deep impression on my mind. I could no longer content myself with the theory which satisfied Conseil. That worthy fellow persisted in seeing in the Commander of the Nautilus one of those unknown servants who return manking contempt for indifference. For him, he was a misunderstood genius who, tired of earth’s deceptions, had taken refuge in this inaccessible medium, where he might follow his instincts freely. To may mind, this explains but one side of Captain Nemo’s character. Indeed, the mystery of that last night during which we had been chained in prison, the sleep, and the precaution so violently taken by the Captain of snatching from my eyes the glass I had raised to sweep the horizon, the mortal would of the man, due to an unaccountable shock of the Nautilus, all put me on a new track. No; Captain Nemo was not satisfied with shunning man. His formidable apparatus not only suited his instinct of freedom, but perhaps also the design of some terrible retaliation.

That day, at noon, the second officer came to take the altitude of the sun. I mounted the platform, and watched the operation. As he was taking observations with the sextant, one of the sailors of the Nautilus (the strong man who had accompanied us on our first submarine excursion to the Island of Crespo) came to clean the glasses of the lantern. I examined the fittings of the apparatus, the strength of which was increased a hundredfold by lenticular rings, placed similar to those in a lighthouse, and which projected their brilliance in a horizontal plane. The electric lamp was combined in such a way as to give its most powerful light. Indeed, it was produced in vacuo, which insured both its steadiness and its intensity. This vacuum economised the graphite points between which the luminous are was developed – an important point of economy for Captain Nemo, who could not easily have replaced them; and under these conditions their waste was imperceptible. When the Nautilus was ready to continue its submarine journey, I went down to the saloon. The panel was closed, and the course marked direct west.

We were furrowing the waters of the Indian Ocean, a vast liquid plain, with a surface of 1, 200,000,000 of acres, and whose waters are so clear and transparent that any one leaning over them would turn giddy. The Nautilus usually floated between fifty and a hundred fathoms deep. We went on so for some days. To any one but myself, who had a great love for the sea, the hours would have seemed long and monotonous; but the daily walks on the platform, when I steeped myself in the reviving air of the ocean, the sight of the rich waters through the windows of the saloon, the books in the library, the compiling of my memoirs, took up all my time, and left me not a moment of ennui or weariness.

From the 21st to the 23rd of January the Nautilus went at the rate of two hundred and fifty leagues in twentyfour hours, being five hundred and forty miles, or twenty-two miles an hours. If we recognized so many different varieties of fish, it was because, attracted by the electric light, they tried to follow us; the greater part, however, were soon distanced by our speed, though some kept their place in the waters of the Nautilus for a time. The morning of the 24th, we observed Keeling Island, a coral formation, planted with magnificent cocos, and which had been visited by Mr. Darwin and Captain Fitzroy. The Nautilus skirted the shores of this desert island for a little distance. Soon Keeling Island disappeared from the horizon, and our course was directed to the north-west in the direction of the Indian Peninsula.

From Keeling Island our course was slower and more variable, often taking us into great depths. Several times they made use of the inclined planes, which certain internal levers placed obliquely to the waterline. I observed that in the upper regions the water was always colder in the high levels than at the surface of the sea. On the 25th of January the ocean was entirely deserted; the Nautilus passed the day on the surface, beating the waves with its powerful screw and making them rebound to a great height. Three parts of this day I spent on the platform. I watched the sea. Nothing on the horizon, till about four o’clock a steamer running west on our counter. Her masts were visible for an instant, but she could not see the Nautilus, being too low in the water. I fancied this steamboat belonged to the P.O. Company, which runs from Ceylon to Sydney, touching at King George’s Point and Melbourne.

At five o’clock in the evening, before that fleeting twilight which binds night to day in tropical zones, Conseil and I were astonished by a curious spectacle. It was a shoal of Argonauts traveling along on the surface of the ocean. We could count several hundreds. These graceful mollusks moved backwards by means of their locomotive tube, through which they propelled the water already drawn in. Of their eight tentacles, six were elongated, and stretched out floating on the water, whilst the other two, rolled up flat, were spread to the wing like a light sail. I saw their spiral-shaped and fluted shells, which Cuvier justly compares to an elegant skiff. For nearly an hour the Nautilus floated in the midst of this shoal of molluscs.

The next day, 26th of January, we cut the equator at the eighty-second meridian and entered the northern hemisphere. During the day a formidable troop of sharks accompanied us. They were “cestracio philippi” sharks, with brown backs and whitish bellies, armed with eleven rows of teeth, their throat being marked with a large black spot surrounded with white like an eye. There were also some Isabella sharks, with rounded snouts marked with dark spots. These powerful creatures often hurled themselves at the windows of the saloon with such violence as to make us fell very insecure. But the Nautilus, accelerating her speed, easily left the most rapid of them behind.

About seven o’clock in the evening, the Nautilus, half-immersed, was sailing in a sea of milk. At first sight the ocean seemed lactified. Was it the effect of the lunar rays? No; for the moon, scarcely two days old, was still lying hidden under the horizon in the rays of the sun. The whole sky, though lit by the sidereal rays, seemed black by contrast with the whiteness of the waters. Conseil could not believe his eyes, and questioned me as to the cause of this strange phenomenon. Happily I was able to answer him.

“It is called a milk sea,” I explained. “A large extent of white wavelets often to be seen on the coasts of Amboyna, and in these parts of the sea.

“But, sir,” said Conseil, “can you tell me what causes such an effect? For I suppose the water is not really turned into milk.”

“No, my boy’ and the whiteness which surprises you is caused only by the presence of myriads of luminous little worm, gelatinous and without colour, of the thickness of a hair, and whose length is not more than seven-thousandths of an inch. These insects adhere to one another sometimes for several leagues.”

“Several leagues!” exclaimed Conseil.

“Yes, my boy; and you need not try to compute the number of these infusoria. You will not be able, for, if I am not mistaken, ships have floated on these milk seas for more than forty miles.”

Towards midnight the sea suddenly resumed its usual colour; but behind us, even to the limits of the horizon, the sky reflected the whitened waves, and for a long time seemed impregnated with the vague glimmerings of an aurora borealis.

Turning the business around involved more than segmenting and pulling out of retail. It also meant maximizing every strength we had in order to boost our profit margins. In reexamining the direct model, we realized that inventory management was not just a core strength; it could be and incredible opportunity for us, and one that had not yet been discovered by any of competitors.

In Version 1.0 of the direct model, we eliminated the reseller, thereby eliminating the markup and the cost of maintaining a store. In Version 1.1, we went one step further to reduce inventory inefficiencies. Traditionally, a long chain of partners was involved in getting a product to the customer. Let’s say you have a factory building a PC we’ll call model #4000. The system is then sent to the distributor, which sends it to the warehouse, which sends it to the dealer, who eventually pushes it on to the consumer by advertising, “I’ve got model #4000. Come and buy it.” If the consumer says, “But I want model #8000,” the dealer replies, “Sorry, I only have model #4000.” Meanwhile, the factory keeps building model #4000s and pushing the inventory into the channel.

The result is a glut of model #4000s that nobody wants. Inevitably, someone ends up with too much inventory, and you see big price corrections. The retailer can’t sell it at the suggested retail price, so the manufacturer loses money on price protection (a practice common in our industry of compensating dealers for reductions in suggested selling price). Companies with long, multi-step distribution systems will often fill their distribution channels with products in an attempt to clear out older technologies or meet their financial targets. This dangerous and inefficient practice is called “channel stuffing”. Worst of all, the customer ends up paying for it by purchasing systems that are already out of date.

Because we were building directly to fill our customers’ orders, we didn’t have finished goods inventory devaluing on a daily basis. Because we aligned our suppliers to deliver components as we used them, we were able to minimize raw material inventory. Reductions in component costs could be passed on tour customers quickly, which made them happier and improved our competitive advantage. It also allowed us to deliver the latest technology to our customers faster than our competitors.

The direct model turns conventional manufacturing inside out. Conventional manufacturing dictates that you should always have a stockpile of raw materials, because if you run out, your plant can’t keep going. But if you don’t know what you need to build because of dramatic changes in demand, you run the risk of ending up with terrific amount of excess and obsolete inventory. That is not the goal. The concept behind the direct model has nothing to do with stockpiling and everything to do with information. The quality of your information is inversely proportional to the amount of assets required, in this case excess inventory. With less information about customer needs, you need massive amounts of inventory. So, if you have great information – that is, you know exactly what people want and how much – you need that much less inventory. Less inventory, of course, corresponds to less inventory depreciation. In the computer industry, component prices are always falling as suppliers introduce faster chips, bigger disk drives, and modems with ever-greater bandwidth. Let’s say that Dell has six days of inventory. Compare that to an indirect competitor who has twenty-five days of inventory with another thirty in their distribution channel. That’s a difference of forty-nine days, and in forty-nine days, the cost of materials will decline about 6 percent.

Then there’s the threat of getting stuck with obsolete inventory if you’re caught in a transition to a nextgeneration product, as we were with those memory chips in 1989. As the product approaches the end of its life, the manufacturer has to worry about whether it has too much in the channel and whether a competitor will dump products, destroying profit margins for everyone. This is a perpetual problem in the computer industry, but with the direct model, we have virtually eliminated it. We know when our customers are ready to move on technologically, and we can get out of the market before its most precarious time. We don’t have to subsidize our losses by charging higher prices for other products.

And ultimately, our customer wins. Optimal inventory management really starts with the design process. You want to design the product so that the entire product supply chain, as well as the manufacturing process, is oriented not just for speed but for what we call velocity. Speed means being fast in the first place. Velocity means squeezing time out of every step in the process.

Inventory velocity has become a passion for us. To achieve maximum velocity, you have to design your products in a way that covers the largest part of the market with the fewest number of parts. For example, you don’t need nine different Disk drives when you can serve 98 percent of the market with only four. We also learned to take into account the variability of low-cost and high-cost components. Systems were reconfigured to allow for a greater variety of low-cost parts and a limited variety of expensive parts. The goal was to decrease the number of components to manage, which increased the velocity, which decreased the risk of inventory depreciation, which increased the overall health of our business system.

We were also able to reduce inventory well below the levels anyone thought possible by constantly challenging and surprising ourselves with the results. We had our internal skeptics when we first started pushing for ever-lower levels of inventory. I remember the head of our procurement group telling me that this was like “flying low to the ground 300 knots.” He was worried that we wouldn’t see the trees.

In 1993, we had $2.9 billion in sales and $220 million in inventory. Four years later, we posted $12.3 billion in sales ad had inventory of 33 million. We’re now down to six days of inventory and we’re starting to measure it in hours instead of days. Once you reduce your inventory while maintaining your growth rate, a significant amount of risk comes from the transition from one generation of product to the next. Without traditional stockpiles of inventory, it is critical to precisely time the discontinuance of the older product line with the ramp-up in customer demand for the newer one. Since we were introducing new products all the time, it became imperative to avoid the huge drag effect from mistakes made during transitions. E

My comrade and I had been quartered in Jamaica, and from there we had been drafted off to the British settlement of Belize, lying away West and North of the Mosquito coast. At Belize there had been great alarm of one cruel gang of pirates (there were always more pirates than enough in those Caribbean Seas), and as they got the better of our English cruisers by running into out-of-the-way creeks and shallows, and taking the land when they were hotly pressed, the governor of Belize had received orders from home to keep a sharp look-out for them along shore. Now, there was an armed sloop came once a year from Port Royal, Jamaica, to the Island, laden with all manner of necessaries, to eat, and to drink, and to wear, and to use in various ways; and it was aboard of that sloop which had touched at Belize, that I was standing, leaning over the bulwarks.

The Island was occupied by a very small English colony. It had been given the name of Silver-Store. The reason of its being so called, was, that the English colony owned and worked a silver-mine over on the mainland, in Honduras, and used this Island as a safe and convenient place to store their silver in, until it was annually fetched away by the sloop. It was brought down from the mine to the coast on the backs of mules, attended by friendly local people and guarded by white men; from thence it was conveyed over to Silver-store, when the weather was fair, in the canoes of that country; from Silver-Store, when the weather was fair, in the canoes of that country; from Silver-Store, it was carried to Jamaica by the armed sloop once a – year, as I have already mentioned; from Jamaica, it went, of course, all over the world.

How I came to be aboard the armed sloop, is easily told. Four-and-twenty marines under command of a lieutenant – that officer’s name was Lidgerwood – had been told off at Belize, to proceed to Silver-Store, in aid of boats and seamen stationed there for the chase of the Pirates. The Island was considered a good post of observation against the pirates, both by land and sea; neither the pirate ship nor yet her boats had been seen by any of us, but they had been so much heard of, that the reinforcement was sent. Of that party, I was one. It included a corporal and a sergeant. Charker was corporal, and the sergeant’s mane was Drooce. He was the most tyrannical non-commissioned officer in His Majesty’s service.

The night came on, soon after I had the foregoing words with Charker. All the wonderful bright colours went out of the sea and sky in a few minutes, and all the stars in the Heavens seemed to shine out together, and to look down at themselves in the sea, over one another’s shoulders, millions deep.

Next morning, we cast anchor off the Island. There was a snug harbour within a little reef; there was a sandy beach; there were cocoa-nut trees with high straight stems, quite bate, and foliage at the top like plumes of magnificent green feathers; there were all the objects that are usually seen in those parts, and I am not going to describe them, having something else to tell about.

Great rejoicings, to be sure, were made on our arrival. All the flags in the place were hoisted, all the guns in the place were fired, and all the people in the place came down to look at us. One of the local people had come off outside the reef, to pilot us in, and remained on board after we had let go our anchor.

My officer, Lieutenant Linderwood, was as ill as the captain of the sloop, and was carried ashore, too. They were both young men of about my age, who had been delicate in the West India climate. I thought I was much fitter for the work than they were, and that if all of us had our deserts, I should be both of them rolled into one. (It may be imagined what sort of an officer of marines I should have made, without the power of reading a written order. And as to any knowledge how to command the sloop-Lord! I should have sunk her in a quarter of an hour!)

However, such were my reflections; and when we men were ashore and dismissed, I strolled about the place along with Charker, making my observations in a similar spirit.

It was a pretty place; ;in all its arrangements partly South American and partly English, and very agreeable to look at on that account, being like a bit of home that had got chipped off and had floated away to that spot, accommodating itself to circumstances as it drifted along. The huts of the local people, to the number of five-and-twenty, perhaps, were down by the beach to the left of the anchorage. On the right was a sort of barrack, with a South American Flag and the Union Jack, fling from the same staff, where the little English colony could all come together, if they saw occasion. It was a walled square of building, with a sort of pleasure-ground inside, and inside that again a sunken block like a powder magazine, with a little square trench round it, and steps down to the door.

Charker and I were looking in at the gate, which was not guarded; and I had said to Charker, in reference to the bit like a powder magazine, “That’s where they keep the silver you;” and Charker had said to me, after thinking it over, “And silver ain’t gold. Is it, Gill?”

Indian car rental market may be segmented under four broad categories. First, the most popular segment is of a fuel conscious and mileage hungry consumer who prefers a chauffer driven car. To extract maximum benefit from hired car, consumer representing

(5) mileage per liter of fuel that he has paid for. Consumer of this segment is very price sensitive and wants maximum value for money even if he may rent an by unorganized players. Branded players are lagging behind to true this segment because

(10) Indian marker, organized car rental industry is crawling for the last couple of years to position itself as a most sought after option to meet segment requirements. Hertz India is also practicing the same. To position itself perfectly in the mind of the targeted segment, it has gone for multiple strategic routes to win over different segments. The major external influencing factors for the consumer in this segment may

(15) be the firm’s marketing efforts to establish itself as a service provider with value for money. Due to their association with renewed airlines and hotels, Hertz, to a lot many people means faith. This may help Her to create an impression in the mind of this segment that they will definitively be cheated and get their value, even if it means spending a little extra. Further, it is trying to educate this segment about

(20) benefits of self-driven car as a medium of hassle-free journey by projecting a premium value for money image and with a fleet nix of compact and luxury cars (such as Ikon, Accent and Esteem).Second, a sizable amount of people are there who usually use their own compact or three box mid size car but prefer to enjoy the riding thrill of SUV (sports ?Utility Vehicles)

(25) like Ford Endeavor/Honda CRV/GM Chevrolet or a Luxury car like a Mercedes/Camry for a shorter time span. Upcoming new generations urban executive of large corporate in India with a high disposable income and proactive to enjoy all new things in life and to make it more adventurous and eventful represent this segment. To them renting a self-drive car and driving off to a palace of their choice in a

(30) Mercedes /SUV gives them an experience off to a place of their choice in a holiday. Under this same self-drive segment, another type of consumers are frequent international travelers (including foreign tourists) who prefer their privacy and independence and wish to choose their own routes/ car model at the time of exploring destination. They love their freedom& space in life whereever they

(35) travel without any barrier like being driven by a chauffer. Equipped with their internationally accepted credit cards, an international driving permit or license, they prefer advance car rental booking by logging on the car rental company’s website and thereafter just picking up the keys of their booked car once they enter a new country/city. They are adventurous, driving enthusiast, belonging to the uppermiddle

(40) class, have brand loyalty about their car rental agency. In this self-driven segment, Hertz India is trying to position itself as a contemporary service provider by offering both economy cars and SUV’s (Scorpio and Tata Safari). To win over occasional self-drivers of SUV type cars and frequent travelers. Hertz uses slo-gans like “Break free” or “Drive the World’s #1” regularly in travel magazines to portrait the quality of its cars,

(45) and the range it offers.
Third segment consists of instructional consumers, mainly hotels in big cities and air service providers. Institutional consumers prefer quality and service assurance to offer maximum possible service to their customers. In India, all big car rental agencies have contract with start hotels to offer rental service to them. In this segment, Hertz has

(50) prominent clienteles like Taj Group of Hotels, Marriott and Jet Airways. Further, they have contract with hotels like Shangrila in Delhi, and Renaissance and JW Marriott in Mumbai to provide all car rental requirements of them. Their other clients are Carlson Wagonlit, BTI Sita, Thomas Cook and online travel sites like Make my trip, India times and Travelgutu. according to their deal with Jet Airways, it allows Jet

(55) Privilege members to earn ‘miles’ every time they use Hertz car rental service. for every Rs. 1000/- spent on Hertz rentals, a Jet privilege member earns 100 JP Miles and special discounts are given to platinum, gold and silver card holders.
In recent past ‘fleet management’ is coming up a s a possible fourth target segment for car rental companies in India. Word wide cars are not purchased but only leased and

(60) this trend is getting its root in Indian market also. It means the management of a fleet of vehicles, using certain tools, to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness. To win over consumers of this segment, services should be professional and a fleet management company should address all the issues a company might deal a\with pertaining to managing its fleet. In India, Lease plan Fleet Management

(65) India (LPFM), the wholly-owned subsidiary of Leas plan Corporation, Natherlands is pioneer in this focusing more on car rentals than on fleet management. Though it provides chauffeur-driven cars to many companies like IBM, Sony, KPMG, Compaq, there is a huge scope in this segment for future growth. this segment demands

(70) Customized service in terms of vehicle acquisition, fuel management, vehicle financing and maintenance, resale of the cars at the end of the contract period etc.