Avis, 'We try harder': a promise built on admitting you are second

In 1962 Avis was a distant second to Hertz in American car rental and, by most accounts, had not made a profit in years. Its new chief executive, Robert Townsend, hired the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. The campaign it produced, written by Paula Green under Bill Bernbach, opened with a headline no company had used about itself: Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars, so why go with us? The answer was the line that stayed for half a century: We try harder. When you are not the biggest, the copy went on, you cannot afford dirty cars or half-empty tanks.

The campaign is credited with turning the company around: Avis moved into profit soon after it began, and its share of the market grew. Hertz eventually answered with ads of its own explaining why it was number one, which in practice confirmed the frame Avis had built. Avis kept the slogan in some form until 2012.

The premise was a confession

Every proposition starts with a premise, the statement of who it is for and on what terms. Most companies write theirs as an aspiration. Avis wrote a fact the public could check. It was second, and it said so. That honesty did two jobs at once. It made the rest of the message believable, since a company that admits an unflattering truth earns credit for the next sentence. And it selected the right customer: the traveler who had been ignored at a busy counter and would trade the biggest fleet for more attention.

Our books describe the premise as the cheapest insurance a brand can buy. An honest one cannot be exposed later. Hertz could not reveal that Avis was smaller, because Avis had already said it, louder and first.

A promise you can catch someone breaking

“We try harder” also worked as a contract. A real promise can be broken in a way the customer can see, and this one could be broken at every counter in the country: a dirty ashtray, a long line, an unfriendly agent. That exposure was the source of its strength. It put a standard in front of every employee and gave customers a reason to judge, which made the cars and the service the proof.

Avis made the promise internal as well. Staff wore buttons with the line, and the slogan became a working standard inside the company as much as an advertisement outside it. A promise that the people delivering it can name is far easier to keep than one written only for the media plan.

The cost of borrowing the leader’s frame

There is a price in this kind of positioning, and it is worth naming. Every Avis ad mentioned, or implied, Hertz. The campaign rode the leader’s visibility, a move our books call adversarial bandwagoning: you borrow the frame and salience someone else built by contrasting yourself against them. It works quickly, and it ties your identity to a rival. As long as the promise is defined as trying harder than number one, number one stays at the center of the story.

Avis lived with that trade for decades, and it paid off. It worked because the comparison was honest and the promise was backed by daily behavior. A challenger that copies the structure without the honesty, claiming to be the underdog while acting like everyone else, gets the dependence on the leader and none of the trust.

The lesson for a company in second place, or third, is to start from the truth of its position and build a promise that position makes credible. Being smaller is an argument when it explains why you will behave better, and when your people can show it every day.

If you need to turn an honest position into a promise your teams can keep, see what we do and how we design it with you.