Avis told customers outright it was only #2, and the confession made everything else it said believable

the problem

A distant #2 with 13 years of losses and no real edge

background

what everyone would do

Claim to be the best, fastest, or friendliest — the standard advertising move for any challenger brand. It fails because a distant #2 with no real product edge claiming superiority is exactly what every also-ran in the category says, indistinguishable from Hertz's own confident messaging and unbelievable to a market that already knows who's actually #1.

what they saw

DDB saw that an unbelievable superiority claim was worse than useless — it would be tuned out or actively undermine Avis by highlighting the gap between the claim and reality. Admitting the true, verifiable weakness instead, that Avis was only #2, made the ad instantly credible precisely because it was obviously true, and that credibility carried over to the claim that followed, which otherwise would have been just as suspect as any other advertising promise.

the move

Avis's agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, with copywriter Paula Green working under Bill Bernbach and the backing of CEO Robert Townsend, ran ads that opened by naming the problem outright: 'Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us?' — answered with 'We try harder,' explaining that a distant challenger, unlike a comfortable market leader, had to work harder on the details customers actually felt: shorter lines, newer cars, cleaner ashtrays, fuller tanks.

why it works

An audience conditioned to discount advertising superlatives has no reason to believe an also-ran's claim to be the best, but opening with an unambiguously true, self-deprecating admission short-circuits that skepticism because it obviously isn't exaggerated or self-serving — unusually honest for the category. Because the ad had already proven itself trustworthy by stating something against its own interest, the audience extended that same trust to the follow-up claim, 'we try harder,' which logically followed from the admission rather than arriving as an arbitrary boast: a challenger with something to prove naturally works harder than a comfortable leader, making the whole argument internally consistent rather than a claim bolted onto a confession. That credibility converted into real behavior — choosing Avis for specific, felt reasons like cleaner cars and shorter lines — which is what turned thirteen years of losses into profit within a single year.

the payoff

Within a year Avis turned a $3.2 million annual loss into a $1.2 million profit, its first profitable year in thirteen, and its market share climbed over the following years as the gap with Hertz narrowed from roughly 61%-29% in 1962 toward 49%-36% by 1966.

where it breaks

The technique only works when the admitted weakness is genuinely, verifiably true and not something the audience will dispute — a fabricated or exaggerated admission fails the same credibility test it's designed to pass. It also depends on having a real, logically connected follow-up claim that flows from the admitted weakness; without an actual causal story linking 'we're smaller' to 'we're better in specific ways,' the confession has no payoff. And it requires the audience to genuinely care about the specific area where the underdog claims to compensate — an admission of weakness paired with an irrelevant compensating claim wouldn't move behavior even if both parts were individually credible.

what came after

'We Try Harder' ran for over five decades and is still taught in advertising and marketing courses as the canonical case for turning an admitted competitive weakness into the basis of the pitch instead of a liability to be hidden — honest underdog positioning as a durable strategic framework, not just a clever slogan.

references

1. [1]Avis "We Try Harder": The Campaign That Made Being Second an AdvantageMarketing Case Studies (mynameiskalam.com), 2023mynameiskalam.com
2. [2]Avis: 'We're Only No. 2. We Try Harder.'CrazyAds, 2023crazyads.org

keep it

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