When Zanola employees travel and need to rent a car, the decision usually comes down to one off-the-wall request: “Which one has the most cigarette lighters?” No one at Zanola Company smokes and rental companies will not let you smoke in their cars, but conducting on-site research for our research studies, assessments services, sales management, and marketing consulting depends on having a steady stream of electricity for our equipment. This means having places to plug our DC to AC adapter in - with backup plug-ins, just in case.

We run our GPS tracking, custom mapping, and data entry through a single laptop in the field, and we strive to keep that laptop fully charged so we can focus solely on the observing conditions in the markets we visit. Keeping our phones charged so we can consult satellite imagery and internet searches is also crucial.

So before we load up all our fieldwork materials, we make sure the car we are renting can hold up. We not only ask for a car in the lower price range with multiple DC sockets, but then we test our AC adapter with each of them before leaving the lot. Appearance, cleanliness, and smell are secondary to making sure we can gather data for our clients in the most efficient manner possible.

Just over the past few months, Zanola has completed fieldwork for clients in Missouri, Tennessee, and Nebraska, so our car rental ritual is going to get a lot of action. Keep an eye on updates from the road on our new studies!

By Angelo Zanola