New ad campaign won’t be a game changer for VW
Automaker may be renowned for connecting with consumers, but rebranding at this point isn’t necessarily a wise move
Will ditching its Das Auto branding line help convince the car buying public that Volkswagen AG has started to find its way forward?
Equating a successful advertising campaign with a company’s future fortunes may feel like overreach, but Volkswagen has long had the Midas touch when it comes to connecting consumers to their product and thereby its corporate culture.
The inimitable “Think Small” campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, the genius of U.S. ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach a half-century ago, still stands as one of the cleverest campaigns of the age, strikingly counterculture and distinctively not a product of the Big Three American automakers.
Das Auto is not quite in that class, but still, commercials featuring humourless white-coated engineers effectively telegraphed Volkswagen’s purported core competencies: precision — ja; reliability — ja. Both of those markers begat what any company cares about most: trust. Ja ja ja. Simple. Universal. Translatable. Understandable. Volkswagen now wants to “change the story,” as ad folks like to say. (And PR folks too.) This has not gone smoothly.
Three months have passed since the Environmental Protection Agency issued a notice of violation under the Clean Air Act, first targeting 2.0-litre diesel engines on Volkswagen and Audis in the U.S.
That was just the beginning of “Dieselgate,” but it’s worth reminding, again, that the EPA was investigating unauthorized “defeat devices” on Volkswagens going back to the early 1970s and that from that point forward, the burden of proof lay with the manufacturer to demonstrate that any software would not adversely affect emissions during “actual use.”
Two weeks ago, Volkswagen updated investors and consumers on the first significant findings from its internal investigation into the who, why and when of the scandal. The company asserts that the “when” is now clear. “The starting point was a strategic decision to launch a large-scale promotion of diesel vehicles in the United States in 2005,” the company said in a Dec. 10 release. When it “proved impossible” to meet the nitrogen oxide requirements in the U.S. on time and on budget, software was incorporated that adjusted NOx emission levels, with lower readings when the vehicles were in the test bay as opposed to on the road.
To a significant degree, the “why” remains incomprehensible: even after an “effective technical process” to reduce emissions was made available, the firm chose not to deploy the new process.
The “who” thus far has been contained to nine managers who may have been involved in the manipulation. The Dieselgate Nine were suspended.
The investigation into how Volkswagen became a cheating company is far from over and could take months to conclude. Lawsuits number in the hundreds.
Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch has said it’s not yet known if those involved in 2005 were aware of the risks they were taking. That’s awfully hard to swallow.
The rules of damage control dictate that a corporation ring-fence any disaster. Pushing former chairman Martin Winterkorn out the door was the first, predictable, move. Suggesting a small group of insiders were the true culprits is an obvious second move.
Volkswagen is now tying the two together by portraying itself as a hidebound, arrogant, command-and-control operation under a centralized authority personified by Winterkorn himself. In this version, it is the corporate culture that’s at fault: armies of yes men; an absence of independent thinkers.
The new CEO, Matthias Mueller, says the new Volkswagen needs to be peopled with the “curious, independent and pioneering.” More Silicon Valley, less Wolfsburg.
To that end, a Reuters story Tuesday reported that at a recent corporate gathering “male staff were encouraged to remove their ties — an unheard of suggestion in the buttoned-up Winterkorn era — and managers even folded shirts in a team-building exercise.”
I read this in the ironic spirit in which I hope it was intended. Rather like the Das Auto campaign. Seeking a new slogan won’t be a game changer for the company. I’m not even convinced that new branding is a wise gambit at this juncture. The company can’t convincingly convey any brand promise until Dieselgate is well and truly behind it.