What would make a lemon ad for a car so successful? The term has been used for cars for a long time when referring to a broken car so why would an ad using the term boost sales? The ad showed how strict guidelines where for the Volkswagen bug where so strict that a scratch on the chrome for the glove box made it a lemon in the company’s eyes. “The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced. Chances are you wouldn't have noticed it; Inspector Kurt Kroner did. There are 3,389 men of our Wolfsburg factory with only one job;…(3,00 Volkswagens are produced daily; there are more inspectors than cars.)... VWs have been rejected for surface scratches barely visible to the eye...This preoccupation with detail means the VW lasts longer and requires less maintenance, by and large, than other cars…We pluck the lemons; you get the plums.” (http://www.powerwriting.com/vw-lemon-ad.html) “However, one campaign did much more than boost sales and build a lifetime of brand loyalty. It's the 1960s ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle. It, and 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 today.” (http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/1999/11/22/smallb7.html) Volkswagen hired Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency to do the advertisement. The company needed a way to sell a German product in a post word war period. The bug was nothing near the American cars that where being built in the time period. Cars of that time period where big and luxurious where the bug was small and basic. So Doyle Dane Bernbach had to bring focus on how reliable and how well built the vehicle was to sell the car. The sister ad of “Think Small” has been named the number one ad out of the top 100 ads of the century (http://adage.com/century/campaigns.html) This ad went beyond what people thought it would do it placed Volkswagen is such a better light then how they where seen of the past.
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