Volkswagen, 'Think Small': a premise that told most buyers to look elsewhere

At the end of the 1950s the American car market rewarded size. Detroit sold long, low cars heavy with chrome, restyled them every year, and advertised them with painted scenes of glamorous families. Volkswagen was selling a small, round, air-cooled car designed in Germany in the 1930s under the Nazi regime, one that barely changed from one year to the next. In 1959 Volkswagen’s American business gave its advertising to Doyle Dane Bernbach. Under Bill Bernbach, copywriter Julian Koenig and art director Helmut Krone produced a page that was mostly empty: a small photograph of the Beetle near the top and, underneath, the headline Think small.

In 1960 came “Lemon”, one word under a photograph of a Beetle that looked flawless. The copy explained that an inspector at the Wolfsburg factory, Kurt Kroner, had rejected the car because the chrome strip on the glove compartment was blemished. The campaign kept that plain, wry voice for years, and the Beetle became one of the best-selling imported cars in the United States, with American sales peaking in 1968. In 1999 Advertising Age named “Think Small” the best advertising campaign of the twentieth century.

A premise written for the few

Before it was an ad, Think Small was a premise: the part of a value proposition that says who the offer is for and, with the same weight, who it is not for. Volkswagen’s buyer was the person who found the annual restyle a little absurd, someone who wanted a car that was cheap to run, easy to park and would still look current next year. Everyone else was told, politely, that this car was not for them.

Size, the value the whole market treated as central, became what our books call an antithesis: a value refused in public, which selects the customer at the door. That refusal had a cost. Plenty of Americans read a small foreign car as a compromise, and the ads made no effort to win them over. Accepting that loss is the test of a mature premise, because a brand that courts the people its product will disappoint ends up writing copy that persuades nobody.

A quality claim with a name and a number

“Lemon” moved the campaign from tone into proof. Quality is the cheapest claim to print and the hardest to believe, so the ad gave the reader a mechanism to picture instead. The copy said that 3,389 men at Wolfsburg had only one job, inspecting Volkswagens at each stage of production, and it told the story of one car turned away for a flaw no buyer would have noticed.

A detail like that works because it is specific enough to be costly. It raises the standard every future Beetle will be judged by, and a company invents it at its own risk. The layout did similar work. White space, an unretouched photograph and dense copy in small type made the page look like it had nothing to hide, while Detroit’s illustrations sold a lifestyle around the car. Volkswagen showed the object and described it with unusual precision.

The honesty had a long shelf life

An honest premise is the cheapest insurance a brand can buy, since nobody can expose it later. Nobody could reveal that the Beetle was small, slow or plain, because the ads had said so first and found a reason to like each fact. The car helped: its design changed so little that the same voice could run for more than a decade, and each new execution reinforced the ones before it.

The same tight fit set the limit. A promise welded to one unchanging object has little room to move when the market does. In the 1970s American buyers and regulators asked more of small cars, Volkswagen introduced the Rabbit (the Golf, under its American name) in 1975, and the Beetle sedan left the American line-up after 1977. The campaign had described one car so well that the brand had to find a new story for the next one.

The useful part for any company is the order of operations. Volkswagen started from what the product truly was, picked the customer who would value exactly that, and then found a proof the public could picture. If your offer has a trait the market treats as a weakness, see what we do and how we build a premise and a proof around it with you.