Marketing

THE NEW BEETLE

GROUP NUMBER: 1

GROUP MEMBERS:

Aarushi Jain (SMBA12001)

Pallavi Ghai (SMBA12021)

Shivam Goyal (SMBA12029)

Vikas Miglani (SMBA12037)

Zainab Asrani (SMBA12038)

Elizabeth Lespinet

INTRODUCTION

Beetle, a very compact car is produced by VW or Volkswagen, a car manufacturer in Germany. The original Beetle was born in the mid 1930’s, when Ferdinand Porsche began drawing up plans for "Volksauto," a people car. Initially, VW had become the most successful car model ever, selling over 21 million cars. VW expanded their market to America and had to compete to other local, European, and Japanese producers. With its distinctive round shape, face-like front end, and low price, the car was becoming prevalent as a new generation of Americans.

On January 5, 1998, VW had exhibited its new line up of cars called the New Beetle at North American International Auto Show. This car had been an unexpected star at that show. Due to which VW experienced 25% of the 1998 sales target, which was 200,000 units, a 45% increase over the 1997 sales of 137,885 cars.

According to the former experiences, VW had seen sales in the US decline from over half a million cars in 1970 to less than 50,000 cars by 1993. However, with support of a new advertising campaign targeted to a younger generation of car drivers and product guidelines, VW of America had steadily recovered with annual sales growth of 29% over 1993 to 1997 period.

The marketing team conducted research focusing on the segmentation, targeting, brand positioning, and competition. Besides, VW also improved the marketing communication strategies which were organized nationally rather than within smaller geographic regions. The pricing strategy finally had been the crucial thing to study as the VW team realized that a superior-price strategy could be animpending issue. The qualitative research depicted that many consumers would perceive the new beetle as a “toy car”, and so they key element of the cars...