The editorial slant is strong on how to fix your Volkswagen, how to put out your own club newspaper, how to help your club grow and how to get to the national convention. They don't realize there ever were pioneers. Based on replacement orders for them, the Red Wolf Club once flourished at the rate of 3, new members a month, but the company discontinued the medallion on the models and that club will soon be that.
Although the Volkswagen company is very much appreciative of the good work done by the faddists during the s, it was acutely conscious that it just might need a less whimsical clientele in the years ahead. In , therefore, despite the fact VW sales had been galloping upward year after year and most dealer agencies still had three-to-four-month waiting lists, VWoA began to advertise its product for the first time.
It does not deny that Detroit's decision to produce its compacts in the same year spurred VWoA on, if ever so gently. What a happy day for Volkswagen it turned out to be. The pioneer faddists considered the move a bow to cheap commercialism, naturally, but just about everybody else considers the VW ad campaign the most successful ever to run up the flagpole or to get off the to Westport. Volkswagen ads have won a list of prizes longer than an account executive's expense account; they are talked about at cocktail parties, read aloud at the office water cooler, analyzed and dissected in college term papers.
A teen-ager in Manhattan named Kitty Brown cuts them out and frames them to decorate her 4-year-old brother's bedroom, and first-graders in California, where everything blooms early, have invented their own in a class competition. Creative supervisors at other advertising agencies regularly harass their staffs by asking, "Why can't you guys think up stuff like this? A recent ad run in the U. Says a man who works on the account at Doyle Dane Bernbach Inc.
Frankly, it's getting a little wearisome. Happily for Volkswagen, weariness is the furthest thing from the advertisements, which, for almost four years now, have sustained a freshness that has taxed the talents of five copywriters and reduced Helmut Krone, the art director, to a state of semishock.
But perhaps it has been worth the effort. Daniel Starch, Inc. What Doyle Dane Bernbach has always had in mind concerning the Volkswagen, says Bernbach, "was to tell the truth about the car and to tell it artfully enough so that people would believe it. Telling the truth is easy, but convincing the people you're telling the truth in an advertisement is hard. It seemed clear that what we ought to do was go home and write honest advertisements. Volkswagen ads, nearly all of which depend on simple, unadorned illustrations of the sedan or station wagon, have been so honest they have often made executives at VWoA choke.
Under a glaring blank space an ad once said: "No point showing the '62 Volkswagen. It still looks the same. One ad faced a fact there was no escaping: "Do you think the Volkswagen is homely? Another ad for the station wagon took the beetle by the pinchers when it said, "We also make a funny-looking car" shudders at VWoA. Making a case for the boxy station wagon has sometimes called for even more drastic measures of honest self-appraisal.
DDB has suggested that, like a turkey with four drumsticks, it's nice but "it looks a little strange at first," and a TV commercial has a station wagon owner say: "Back in '51 we had a Volkswagen sedan.
People looked at us as if we had two heads. Now we have a station wagon. People still look at us as if we had two heads. The agency has also addressed itself to the station wagon's principal opponents: women.
We admit it looks like a bus. We admit it takes courage to drive one. And once we've admitted to all the objections people have, they start paying attention to the positive things you can do with a station wagon. Because they sell cars and because of the felicitous phrasing and guileless thought that pervades them, it might be assumed no fault could be found with Volkswagen advertisements.
But, some is found, and it is prompted by an unexpected reason. Say a man who reads the ads finally goes out and buys a VW. And say he drives it for 40, or 50, miles, and it breaks down. You know what he may think? He may think he's been betrayed by his best friend.
He didn't think a VW could break down. Like the New Beetle, the current Beetle is front-engine and front-wheel drive, with more modern engine and transmission choices as well as the latest in-cabin technologies. It is also the first US-spec Beetle to offer a diesel engine. The current iteration of the Volkswagen Beetle falls under the two-door specialty coupe and convertible category. Sales, however, began to fall in ensuing years, and are now less than half what they were at their current-generation peak.
That said, Volkswagen will discontinue Beetle production in , some 80 years after the original model rolled out. The VW Beetle will soon be history, but its place in global autodom will continue to live on. You must be logged in to post a comment. Check out our Jobs Board! Subscribe in a reader. Auto Trends Magazine Car reviews, industry news, and advice.
The book was initially published around or so, and reissued two years ago. Cervaise, just how big IS a breadbox, anyway? I remember a bread drawer in the kitchen cabinet; it was lined with metal, and had a metal sliding lid.
Was it supposed to keep stuff fresh? Volkswagen Beetles: Do they really float? Factual Questions. Computers in the future may weigh no more than 15 tons. And when things flooded! BTW, school buses can run with water up to the top step. Compared to a Chevrolet, yes.
Compared to a Boston Whaler, no. Clop, clop, clop? The original Volkswagen Beetle actually floats. We find out why, and introduce proof of this amazing feat in action. It's hardly an amphibious vehicle, but the original Beetle could indeed float. Search all Volkswagen Beetle cars. About the Author Martin Keane.
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