VW Advertising - The Art of Selling the Air-Cooled Volkswagens

Author: Richard Copping, ISBN: 9781906133634, 156 pages, hardcover, published in 2014

From the '50s to the '70s Volkswagen's publicity and advertising material was among the very best issued by any motor manufacturer. Following the Beetle's launch brochures in the late 1930s, the 1950s saw extraordinarily strong artwork images from the brush of Bernd Reuters and other artists, depicting Saloon, Cabriolet and Transporter in such a way as to suggest more streamlined, spacious and powerful VWs than the reality. In the '60s the American advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach took over, combining stark photography with sharp, witty text and endowing the Beetle with a cult status that took production to over a million for the first time, but VW's new Type 3 and Type 4 models were failing to impress the public, and only the arrival of the Golf saved the day.

Author Richard Copping has a vast collection of VW material and in this book he provides a selection of some 400 of the most striking or interesting images used by the company to sell us its products, taking in every model and variant. The accompanying text guides us through the changing styles of the publicity material as well as through the range of vehicles and thus through the story of Volkswagen in the period.