Design Inspiration – 60’s VW Microbus Ads

Can your wife bake her own bread?

Can she get a kid’s leg stitched and not phone you at the office until it’s all over?

Find something to talk about when the TV set goes on the blink?

Does she worry about the Bomb?

Make your neighbor’s children wish she were their mother?

Will she say “yes” to a camping trip after 50 straight weeks of cooking?

Let your daughter keep a pet snake in the back yard?

Invite 13 people to dinner even though she only has service for 12?

Name a cat “Rover”?

Order escargots.

Live another year without furniture and take a trip to Europe instead?

Let you give up your job with a smile?

And mean it?

Congratulations.

Before the VW microbus became a hippie-mobile it was marketed as a station wagon. The creative ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach produced funny and honest VW ads in the 60’s. The theme of cool chic, used in the ad campaign, suggested that one had to be courageous and different – desirably different – to drive the bus as a family car.

One ad, “How does it feel to show up in one of these?” showed an elegantly evening-gowned woman emerging gracefully from the front seat of a bus at the Plaza. A woman who drove a VW bus back then recalls, “It made me feel cute as a button and interesting as hell.”

This ad makes me realize that marketing to women (and men) has come a long way since the mid-60’s. The above-mentioned desirable female attributes are the norm in my circle of women friends of the next generation, many who have driven microbuses, lived in teepees, traveled solo and grown their own food. Perhaps their mothers drove microbuses?

Excerpt from Think Small; The Story of Those Volkswagen Ads by Frank Rowsome, Jr.

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