EOC Week 1: Vw Lemon

 One campaign boosted sales and build a lifetime of brand loyalty. It's the 1960s ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle. The work of the ad agency behind it, changed the very nature of advertising from the way it's created to what you see as a consumer. Volkswagen hired the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency to create a campaign that would introduce it to the U.S. market in 1960.

Competing automakers were building bigger cars for growing families with baby boomer children. The Beetle was tiny and ugly. Who would buy it? The car was manufactured in Wolfsburg, Germany, at a plant built by the Nazis.
The World War II had ended only 15 years earlier.
 This environment that DDB introduced the Beetle with a radical ad campaign that perfectly positioned the product and won the hearts and minds of the people.
What made the Volkswagen Beetle ad campaign so radical? Ads before it were both information-based and lacking in persuasion and more fantasy than reality.

Beetle ads connected with consumers on an emotional level, while conveying a product benefit in way consumers could relate to. Plus, the ads were breathtakingly simple.
Two famous print ads illustrate this. One featured a small picture of the car with the headline "Think small." Text highlighted the advantages of driving the small Beetle vs. a big car.
The other presented the car with "Lemon" in bold type.  The take-away was obvious and if this was Volkswagen's idea of a lemon, the Beetle must be a well-built car.
The Beetle ad campaign also stands out for its use of television, which was in 90 percent of homes by the mid-1960s. It may have been grainy black-and-white, but the emotional connection between car and consumer was picture perfect in Beetle commercials like "Funeral."

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/1999/11/22/smallb7.html?page=2

Even as "Beetlemania" continued across the land, a threat was on the horizon, and it wasn't coming from Europe or Detroit. Volkswagen increased sales throughout the 1960s to remain America's top-selling foreign make, its share of the import-car market withered from 67 percent in 1965 to a less commanding 51 percent by decade's end.
The small-car demand was still rising, but the Beetle no longer drove it. Two little-known companies Toyota and Datsun, then starting to sell high-quality small cars with performance, room, comfort, features, and even style that put the Beetle invisible.

--http://auto.howstuffworks.com/1960-1969-volkswagen-beetle4.htm and for no more money.

Bernbach's genius lay in placing creativity before research. He abhorred rules and turned away from programmatic approaches to advertising. He believed that advertising needed to respect the public's intelligence and communicate through simple, clear, and precise images and words.
The ads he created for Volkswagen in the 1960s are typically cited as the most famous advertising campaign of the 20th century, and they are credited with transforming a German-made "people's car" into an American icon. His stark black-and-white photographs of the car against white backgrounds broke all the conventional rules. Bernbach also opened recruitment policies of his agency to the most qualified
people he could find, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. By the 1970s, other agencies began adopting his approach and policies.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v008/8.4unit15.html