Advertisement: We Try Harder (Avis)

Overview

In 1962, the car rental underdog Avis partnered with Doyle Dane Bernbach to launch the "We Try Harder" campaign, a landmark in modern advertising. Guided by William Bernbach’s creative philosophy and executed by copywriter Paula Green with art director Helmut Krone, the ad turned Avis’s second-place status into a compelling promise. Instead of pretending to be the leader, the headline acknowledged the truth: when you’re only No. 2, you try harder. The line reframed disadvantage as motivation, giving Avis a distinctive voice of candor at a time when category advertising relied on bravado and bland claims.

Context and Strategy

Hertz dominated the market; Avis was unprofitable and struggling to define a reason to choose it. Robert Townsend, Avis’s new CEO, challenged the agency to craft a positioning that the company could deliver operationally. The strategic leap was to embrace Avis’s place in the pecking order and argue that the pressure of being second produced better service. The promise was not abstract. It was a performance contract: if Avis did not try harder, it would lose. The clarity of that risk, sometimes punctuated by the stark addendum “Or else”, made the claim feel both credible and urgent.

Creative Approach

The ads used the DDB hallmark: radical simplicity. A white page, a conversational headline, crisp serif copy, and a small, restrained visual. The layout invited reading rather than shouting. Green’s copy listed the everyday disciplines that “trying harder” meant in practice, clean ashtrays, tuned wipers, full gas tanks, faster lines, mundane details elevated into proof points. Krone’s typography and spare design underscored honesty, as though the page were a memo rather than a boast. The brand voice was humble, direct, and gently self-deprecating, yet disciplined. It never attacked Hertz by name; it simply implied that the challenger’s hunger would translate into better experiences.

Message and Tone

The core message was a simple equation: pressure breeds performance. By acknowledging a weakness, Avis earned permission to claim strengths. The copy avoided puffery and empty superlatives, replacing them with plain talk about standards and accountability. The ad sounded like a team on the shop floor rather than a committee in a boardroom. That tone resonated with postwar American sensibilities, meritocratic, practical, allergic to hype, and made the proposition feel trustworthy. The line “We Try Harder” became both an external promise and an internal rallying cry, posted in offices and used to guide operations so the advertising would be true.

Market Impact

The campaign quickly reversed Avis’s fortunes. After years of losses, Avis turned a profit within a year of launch, and its market share rose substantially as brand preference climbed. The line endured for decades, becoming one of advertising’s most recognizable taglines and a shorthand for challenger-brand behavior. Its success proved that admitting an inconvenient truth, if paired with a credible remedy, could be more persuasive than claiming invincibility.

Legacy

"We Try Harder" helped define the creative revolution that Bernbach championed: intelligence over noise, humanity over hype, and brand behavior over hollow promises. It influenced generations of underdog brands to own their position and speak plainly. Beyond the tagline’s fame, its deeper legacy is a model of alignment between strategy, copy, design, and operations, the rare ad that did not just sell a service but reshaped a company to live up to its words.