More Than Just Luggage: Avis Redefines the Rental Car Space

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Car Rental is a highly transactional category – pick up the car, drop it off again – and rental brands tend to occupy the same brand territory of reliability and good service. But what if it didn’t have to be that way? With their 80th Anniversary UK ad, Avis are aiming to expand the emotional scope of the brand, linking it not just to the how of car rental but appreciating the why too.

With a gentle piano soundtrack and heartfelt voiceover, the ad positions Avis as part of some big moments in life – their rental cars taking families on holiday and back home, picking up new babies from hospital and seeing off older kids to university. There’s an up and down rhythm to the ad which stops it just being a list and underlines that Avis is there for the tough as well as the joyful parts of life.

That reinforces the brand’s core trust and reliability proposition but also takes it further, giving the brand an emotional dimension not just a transactional one. Avis cares: over its 80 years of service it can be relied upon for any moment when you’re making memories (and plenty of more routine ones too). It’s a subtle shift away from just functional benefits which elevates and redefines the category, summed up in the tagline: “What you’re carrying is more than just luggage”.

This kind of gear shift for a brand needs to be carefully handled. In some cases, a campaign with wide emotional appeal can fall flat amongst a brand’s core target audience. So it’s important to make sure your category redefinition lands with your most valued or desired customers first. For this Test Your Ad Pro project, Avis defined a custom sample matching their target audience – people fitting the socio-economic profile of rental car customers.

It’s important to say, though, that Avis ad was a very strong performer with a general audience too – car services is a category where any kind of emotion or entertainment is in short supply, so Avis ad scores well above the average. It’s in the Top 6% of ads for the category overall.

That’s good news for Avis, but even better news is that their target audience adored the ad, giving it the maximum 5.9-Star Rating. The ad could not perform better at giving a positive, brand-building, emotional experience to the target market. It creates high levels of surprise and happiness, showing that viewers recognise the way the ad moves beyond category conventions to work on a more personal and emotional level.

Short-term metrics – Spike Rating and Brand Fluency – are less exceptional, but this is an anniversary celebration ad whose main job is to build and subtly reposition the brand. It succeeds extremely well at that, providing a bedrock for more traditional promotional marketing to work from. Avis deserve praise for showing once again that there’s no such thing as a ‘boring category’, and finding an emotional benefit that helps it stand out.