The Beetle was the VW brand – the brand and the car were virtually one and the same. Where today we see many car models from VW, in the minds of customers the Beetle established VW in North America and when the company stopped selling the Beetle its sales fell drastically. When the company reintroduced the Beetle sales again took off in North America.

The Beetle was VW.
To that end, the VW brand is represented as “the people’s car”; something that is affordable and dependable. As the case says, it is A Poor Man’s BMW/Mercedes and represented value – buy it, put gas in it and if you have to sell it later on, it’ll probably be worth just as much as you paid for it. One of their ad campaigns emphasized this: “Buy Low Sell High”....