1. Volkswagen Since World War Two: Rebuilding the Corporate Reputation of the World’s Largest Car Manufacturer
- Author:
- Charlie Harris, Jamie Haworth, Scarlett Mansfield, and Christopher McKenna
- Publication Date:
- 02-2020
- Content Type:
- Case Study
- Institution:
- Oxford Centre for Global History
- Abstract:
- The VW badge is a common sight around the world. Driven by millions across Europe and the Americas, Volkswagen automobiles are also familiar to consumers across Latin America, Africa and Asia. The German carmaker’s cultural resonance is hard to miss: most famously, the Volkswagen Beetle ‘Love Bug’ is romanticised in stories of the 1960s counterculture. Alongside the iconic Volkswagen Type 2 camper van, the Beetle came to symbolise freedom and adventure for many young people in the United States. Given this, it is perhaps easy to forget the company’s roots did not exactly emphasise peace and love. Volkswagen started out in late-1930s Germany as a Nazi-funded prestige project; Adolf Hitler took a personal interest in the early development of the Beetle, seeing it as the vehicle that would motorise the Third Reich and displace Ford’s Model T as the “People’s Car”. Burdened with one of the worst origin stories imaginable, Volkswagen needed to put distance between itself and Nazi Germany in the postwar period. To achieve this, it refocused its factory towards delivering the Volkswagen Beetle: a cheap, reliable product that it hoped would appeal to domestic and export markets alike. The iconic car came to be embraced by diverse communities from around the world over the following decades, transforming the German carmaker into a company with a global ubiquity by the 1980s. Its portfolio expanded to include sports cars and trucks, while its factories employed workers across the globe. Entering the new millennium full of ambition, Volkswagen strove for growth in new markets and dominance in long-standing car cultures; in the process, the crisis-prone company attracted a new set of risks to its corporate reputation.
- Topic:
- History, Business, Manufacturing, Automotive Industry, and Reputation
- Political Geography:
- Germany and Global Focus