Original editorial illustration for Time for Designs—not an original Avis advertisement.
A company spends money on advertising to persuade people to choose it. Telling those people that a competitor is bigger seems an odd place to start.
Yet that was the uncomfortable fact at the centre of one of advertising’s best-known campaigns. Avis acknowledged its position behind the market leader and turned it into a reason to give the smaller company a chance.
The promise was only three words: “We try harder.”
Those words are so familiar that the idea can now seem obvious. Of course a challenger should present itself as hungry. Of course a smaller business should say it cares more. But familiarity removes the danger that made the original decision interesting. Avis was giving its audience a fact they could interpret as a warning.
The remarkable part was how the advertising answered that warning. It connected the company’s position with the practical details of renting a car. The customer was not being asked to applaud a brave slogan. They were being given a reason to expect attention.
The admission most businesses would rather avoid
The company’s own history records that it had become the second-largest car-rental business in the United States by 1953. It dates the debut of the celebrated advertising campaign to 1963. Avis’s company history
Second place contained two possible meanings. It could suggest a company that had fallen short. It could also suggest a company with more reason to earn the next customer.
The campaign chose the second interpretation.
This did not erase the disadvantage. It changed the question the audience was invited to ask. Instead of concentrating only on which business was largest, a prospective customer could consider which one had the stronger reason to look after them.
That was a positioning decision before it was a writing decision. The words worked because they expressed a particular relationship between the business, its competitor and the customer.
The people behind the promise
Paula Green wrote the Avis slogan while working at Doyle Dane Bernbach, the agency usually known as DDB. The One Club’s appreciation also records her rise to become the agency’s first woman creative management supervisor. The One Club: Paula Green—An Appreciation
Green worked with art director Helmut Krone. The One Club’s account identifies both as part of the team meeting Avis chief executive Robert Townsend in 1963. This was a collaboration between people responsible for words, visual presentation and the business itself. The One Club: Still Trying Harder
It is worth preserving those names because advertising history has a habit of reducing complicated work to one famous agency figure and one lucky sentence.
The service details made the slogan believable
A general promise of effort would have been easy to dismiss.
The memorable part of the Avis argument was its attention to mundane details. The One Club’s appreciation of Green describes her early advertisements as a kind of operating manual: cars needed to be clean, equipment needed to work and the practical essentials of the rental needed to be right. The One Club: Paula Green—An Appreciation
These were not glamorous benefits. They were precisely the things a traveller would notice.
That gives the campaign a different character from advertising built around an abstract lifestyle. It could be checked. A customer might forget the arrangement of the advertisement but remember whether the car was clean and whether the service was helpful.
Our interpretation is that these details joined the slogan to something the renter could judge. Clean cars and working equipment gave “effort” a concrete meaning; the counter and garage staff still had to deliver it.
The risk was real
Acknowledging second place was not guaranteed to inspire confidence.
According to The One Club’s retrospective, people inside the agency worried that the admission could make Avis seem inferior. It also describes research in which the message produced divided interpretations. This is a historical recollection, not a customer study independently reconstructed for this article. The One Club: Paula Green—An Appreciation
That reaction is understandable. The argument asked the audience to make a leap. Being smaller does not automatically make a company better. Having something to prove does not automatically produce good service.
The campaign had to bridge that gap.
That tension gave the work its character. It also made the accompanying proof important.
An advertisement can become an instruction
The One Club describes campaign buttons worn across Avis, including by counter and garage staff. The message therefore appeared inside the service, rather than existing only in advertisements. The One Club: Still Trying Harder
A slogan carried by staff creates a particular kind of obligation. It tells the customer what to expect while reminding the wearer what the business has promised.
The promise in later campaigns
In January 2011, Avis announced a campaign built around letters from customers praising employees. Its release discussed service responses to unexpected travel problems. These were brand-selected accounts, so they should be understood as campaign material rather than an independent measurement of every customer’s experience. Avis’s original 2011 campaign release
In 2012, Google’s Project Re: Brief brought creators of famous advertising campaigns together with technologists to reconsider their work for digital media. Paula Green and the Avis campaign were among the participants.
Google’s own account identifies the project and its documentary, directed by Doug Pray. Google: Project Re: Brief, the documentary
A remembered promise is not isolated financial proof
Avis’s campaign has an established place in advertising history. The company includes it in its own chronology, Green’s contribution is recognised by The One Club, and the work was revisited in later campaigns and Google’s project. Avis history, The One Club’s appreciation, Google’s project account
Those facts establish longevity and recognition. They do not establish that a three-word slogan single-handedly transformed the company’s finances.
The original tension remains: Avis acknowledged a reason to doubt it, then answered with the practical experience it said a customer could expect. The promise was memorable because it could be tested at the rental desk.