We Try Harder: the original challenger campaign

Read the campaign story

Avis made its position behind a larger competitor the starting point of its advertising. The original We Try Harder work acknowledged that the company was not the category leader and turned that admission into a reason to expect attentive service. DDB developed the campaign, with copywriter Paula Green and art director Helmut Krone identified in WARC’s historical account. The One Club’s Creative Hall of Fame independently credits Green with the line.

Dates are often compressed in retellings. WARC places the agency brief in the context of Robert Townsend’s arrival in 1962; Marketing Week dates the public proposition to 1963. This case uses 1963 for the original campaign while acknowledging the 1962 development context. It does not treat later revivals as the same launch or assign the company’s entire subsequent financial recovery to a slogan.

Editorial reading: The admission works because it is followed by an obligation. Being smaller is not, by itself, a customer benefit. The argument becomes useful only when the company explains what it will do differently because it has more to prove. That converts a potentially defensive comparison into a testable service expectation. The audience is offered a reason to reconsider a familiar hierarchy.

The structure also changes the role of confidence. Rather than claim superiority in every dimension, the brand chooses a narrower promise it can plausibly own. This can make a message feel more credible, but honesty is not a decorative tone. If the service does not support the implied effort, the admission merely makes the weakness more memorable and gives competitors an easy response.

For a small business, the lesson is not to announce an unverified market ranking. It is to identify a real constraint and connect it to a concrete operating choice: fewer clients might permit more personal attention, for example, but only if the business actually delivers it. The communication should name the behaviour and show evidence that customers can evaluate rather than rely on an underdog personality alone.

The opened sources establish the original positioning and creative authorship, not a clean causal estimate of campaign impact. A practical test would compare the promise with customer experience, including response times and service consistency. The enduring mechanism is a disciplined reversal: acknowledge a relevant limitation, explain the responsibility it creates and let delivery prove the argument. The slogan is memorable because it compresses that logic, not because modesty automatically persuades.

Make the admission relevant

Use only a limitation that affects how customers evaluate the offer.

Translate attitude into behaviour

Specify what trying harder changes in the customer experience.

Audit delivery against the promise

Measure service consistency before repeating the claim at scale.

A small test for another brief

Explain one genuine business constraint through the service choice it enables.

Measure credibility and delivery of the named behaviour.

Stop if the claimed benefit cannot be demonstrated in ordinary customer experience.

• Verify the constraint and avoid unsupported rankings.
• Name a concrete customer-facing behaviour.
• Compare the promise with actual service records.