In the late 1950s, American car advertising was loud. Ads showed long, chrome-covered sedans in glamorous illustrations, with promises about power and status. Into that world came a small, round, “strange-looking” German car with an awkward history.
A hard sell
The Volkswagen Beetle had been designed in Germany and was built in a factory in Wolfsburg that had been built by the Nazis. For American buyers in the 1950s, it was small, underpowered by local standards, odd-looking, and associated with a regime the country had just fought a war against. By any conventional logic, it should have been nearly impossible to advertise.
The honest approach
Volkswagen’s agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, decided not to fight those facts but to use them. DDB art director Helmut Krone designed the ads, working with copywriter Julian Koenig under the supervision of agency founder Bill Bernbach.
The first “Think Small” ad looked almost empty. A small black-and-white photo of the Beetle sat in the upper left of a white page. Below it, a two-word headline, “Think small.”, and a few short paragraphs of plain, witty copy explaining the practical advantages of owning a small car: it was cheap to run, easy to park and simple to insure.
Where other car ads bragged, this one shrugged. It admitted the car was small and suggested that was the smart choice.
“Lemon”
Krone designed the “Lemon” ad at the same time. It showed a perfect-looking Beetle under a one-word headline, “Lemon.” The copy explained that this particular car had been rejected by one of Volkswagen’s inspectors over a tiny blemish, and that it would never be sold. The joke turned a word for a bad car into proof of how good the others were.
Why it worked
- It told the truth. In a category full of exaggeration, honesty stood out and built trust.
- It respected the reader. The ads assumed people were smart enough to enjoy a joke and read the copy.
- It turned a weakness into a benefit. Small became sensible, and odd-looking became charming.
- It had a consistent style. Across the first 100 ads, created by a series of copywriters including Bob Levenson under Krone, the layout stayed recognizable: white space, one photo, a short headline, clean type. It became a “house style.”
Legacy
“Think Small” is often credited as a turning point in advertising’s “Creative Revolution” of the 1960s, when agencies like DDB put writers and art directors together and treated ads as clever conversations rather than sales pitches. It helped turn the Beetle into one of the best-selling cars in America and a symbol of 1960s counterculture.
In 1999 Advertising Age named “Think Small” the best advertising campaign of the 20th century. Decades later, ads that use white space, a single image and self-aware copy are still borrowing from it.