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Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost – September 13, 2009
Eight years after the first Model T rolled off Mr. Ford’s Detroit assembly line in 1908, an enterprising Nebraskan named Joe Saunders was reportedly the first person in the rental car business when he lent out his very own Model T to a traveling salesman for an undisclosed amount of money. According to legend, this very first customer is said to have needed transportation for a date with a local girl. In 1916 it was far more impressive to pull up to a young lady’s house in a Model T than in a horse and buggy.
In September of 1918, Walter L. Jacobs, then only 22 years old, opened an actual car rental business in Chicago, his fleet comprised of, again, about a dozen Model T Fords. Mr. Jacobs, something of a renaissance man, also did the repairs himself. By 1923 his business was generating $1 million in annual revenue, a tidy sum, then and now. Clearly he was on to something.
It was not long before the Yellow Cab and Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company, owned by John Hertz, acquired Jacob’s business. General Motors then bought out Hertz’s Company in 1926 and the car rental business became known as the “Hertz Driv-Ur-Self System.” Their magazine ads proclaimed: “For Convenience…More Calls…More Sales…Go by train or plane and when you get there use the Hertz Driv-Ur-Self System.” Hardly “Just Do It,” is it? Verbose advertising was the norm back then; pithy phrases would come later, when television took over as the leading sales force.
Hertz targeted its services to traveling salesmen, a more or less respectable occupation back then, certainly more respectable than that of those who were associated with rental car companies in the early days. Especially during Prohibition, these cars were used most often by bootleggers, bank robbers and prostitutes. “After the 18th Amendment was repealed,” says one business historian at Duke, “The industry was able to regain a respectable reputation and the business grew.”
It continued to grow after the Second World War, when it was closely linked with the boom in the airline industry, a time when Hertz developed the “fly-drive” concept by opening franchises at airports in Atlanta and Milwaukee.
Around this time another car rental company, Avis, started by a former Army Air Corps pilot, began centering almost all of its operations from airports and aggressively advertised services through the airlines themselves. Despite its efforts, in the early 1960s, Avis was still well behind Hertz, the clear leader in the rental car business.
So, in 1962, after Avis spent thirteen years in the red, the company’s newly named president realized that it was time to refresh its image and hired the well known advertising agency of Doyle, Dane and Bernbach (DDB) to turn its business around. Prior to DDB working with Avis, one of the ad agency partners told Avis that they had to first overhaul their customer service and upgrade their product. “It’s always a mistake to make good advertising for a bad product,” Mr. Bernbach memorably said.
Before creating the initial ads in 1963, DDB spent ninety days learning Avis’s business and spent hours in meetings talking to employees about the company. During those first meetings a simple question was asked by DDB: “Why does anybody ever rent a car from you?” The reply heard again and again helped make advertising history: “We try harder because we have to.”
DDB’s top art director already intended to center the campaign on the phrase: “Avis is only number 2.” It was a copywriter named Paula Green who remembered what she learned during those first research meetings and added the famous phrase: “We try harder.” To drive the point home, if you will, the entire management team at Avis traveled to every branch location across the country, spoke with every single employee and explained that the success of the campaign and of their business rested upon providing superior customer service every chance they got.
In just one year, this campaign literally changed the fortunes of the company. Previously, Avis had $34 million in revenue and loses of $3.2 million. One year later, revenues jumped to $38 million and for the first time in thirteen years, the company turned a profit. In four years, from 1962 to 1966, Avis’s market share grew from 11 percent to 35 percent.
It’s called building the brand, a way of identifying your product, a way of building loyalty, a phenomenon not limited to corporations. Politicians have been doing it for years. In the summer of 1932, New York governor Franklin Roosevelt was nominated as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. In his acceptance speech Roosevelt addressed the problems of the Depression by telling the American people: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” Roosevelt would win the election by a landslide.
Interestingly, while the phrase “a new deal” would go on to characterize Roosevelt’s administration; neither the speechwriter who penned it nor the candidate who delivered it thought at the time that it was particularly memorable. Nor did it specifically address the serious crisis in which the nation found itself.
But people liked it; it spoke to the thirteen million Americans who were out of work and the 34 million who had no income at all; people whom the “old deal” had left standing in bread lines. Branding; it would get Roosevelt elected president four times. His successor, Harry Truman, tried to keep the momentum going by labeling his own domestic program “the fair deal,” a rebranding which historians say met with limited success. As Avis learned, you have to have more than words; you have to deliver.
In his presidential nomination acceptance speech, delivered in July of 1960, John F. Kennedy told the convention goers in Los Angeles that the nation stands “today on the edge of a New Frontier – a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils – a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”
“Roosevelt’s New Deal promised security and succor to those in need,” Kennedy said. “But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises, it is a set of challenges…the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not.”
Branding, re-branding, a practice common to business people and politicians, one seeking customers, the other seeking voters. Some campaigns proved remarkably successful, witness Avis. Others, less so, witness 7 – Up, which tried to market its product under the slogan “Make 7-Up Yours,” perhaps not realizing that saying “up yours” to customers might not be the best idea. But then who would have thought that bragging of one’s second place status would have such a positive outcome?
Certainly Peter didn’t think so, did he? Asked the question that lies at the heart of Mark’s Gospel – and occurs halfway through his Gospel - “Who do you say that I am?” – Peter answers on behalf of all the disciples, “You are the Messiah.” That’s right. He has correctly identified Jesus; he is the Messiah. But, before Peter and all the others can market the message, they have to be led into a new understanding – a rebranding – of what exactly it means that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus “began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said this all quite openly.” No more Messianic secret, at least among those closest to Jesus.
But a suffering Messiah is not what the disciples had in mind; their hopes lie in the opposite direction. In their minds, says one New Testament scholar, “through the Messiah God would establish and protect an everlasting kingdom over all the earth. The Messiah would be the perfect king chosen by God from eternity, through whom God would first deliver Israel from its enemies and then cause Israel to live in peace and tranquility thereafter.”
Instead of seeking political or military triumph – being number one in the eyes of the world – Jesus is instead to give himself to rejection, suffering and death. Peter takes Jesus aside, as if he was a disobedient child who needed a time out, “and began to rebuke him.” “But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter” - right there in front of everyone – “and said, ‘Get behind me Satan; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’” Peter understands what Jesus is saying here; he just doesn’t like it very much.
“Get behind me,” a statement of status as much as it is physical position. Jesus is the leader; Jesus has to come first; and I know you can see this coming, Jesus is number one. What does that make us, we who label ourselves his followers? We’re number two.
All who want to be followers of Jesus must follow him; they must go where he goes, through the rejection, the suffering, through the death and - this is vitally important - all who follow Jesus follow him through the resurrection. As one commentator put it, “If dying and rising is good enough for the master, it is more than good enough for the pupil.”
The question those of us who go by the brand name Christian is this: What does it mean to walk in the way of the Messiah, the crucified and risen God; to journey all the way to Cavalry’s cross and to the empty tomb? That is the question we ask ourselves every Sunday here and there is no simple, easy to remember slogan which provides an answer.
But part of what it means to be called a Christian, is to find rest in the knowledge that because Jesus goes ahead of us, we do not have to try harder. For we follow in the way of the one who willingly shared in our weakness, our fear, our pain, our death, only to show us that weakness, fear, pain and death will not have the final word.
The great British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once referred to God as “The fellow sufferer who understands.” Only a God who suffers, who dwells in heaven and in humility, can enter fully into our lives and effect our healing. Only a God who knows what weakness is can transform our weaknesses into new strengths. Only a God who goes as far as sharing our own sense of abandonment can allow us to feel for each other, to enter into and help relieve another’s suffering; help them carry their cross. Or, as a sign I saw recently near an employee time clock in a store said: “Be the brand.”
To do that as Christians, we don’t have to be the best, just do the best we can. Each day, relying on the grace of God, we freely take up our cross – meaning we embrace our discipleship – knowing that Christ has walked the way before us, knowing that he takes upon himself some of its weight, knowing that because he rose anew, we will too.
If that is what being number two is about, then we may enter our frontiers courageously and proclaim our product joy