Fast lane - lovely

Nice VW online ad.

Click here to see it in action. Found via bannerblog.

Website for finding vintage ads

Anybody pursuing a career in marketing should know their advertising history, so you know what worked in the past, why it worked and if it could work now. If this is your thing, you'll like this - a search engine dedicated to vintage ads. Lot of VW ads from Bill Bernbach's time. And beer ads, coke ads etc.

Found via Drayton Bird's site.

Guerrilla, Bypass and Flanking attacks

Image courtesy of Xabier.M

Entering a new market is not easy.

Before leaping in, it is considered wise to focus primarily on the market leader and how you position yourself against it. The market leader generally has the most resources, the most cash, highest profits, best relationships with suppliers and often the better reputation among customers. You need to know how it will react.

And market leaders can be the defensive types. If you look like a threat, you can assume they won't give up market share without a fight.

One way to tackle this is to not fight head on. Instead, start with a product, customer type or area that the market leader is less committed to. These types of attacks are known as bypass, guerrilla and flanking attacks.

While similar, these attacks are not the same.

A guerrilla attack is where you enter a segment where (1) the market leader is not competing and (2) you are not taking any of its customers. A bypass is similar except you might steal some customers from it. A flanking attack is one where the market leader is in the segment but this segment is not a major focus.

Volkswagen's Beetle is often quoted as a great example of a flanking attack on the big Detroit car companies in the 50's. GM, the leader, along with the other car companies, focused on big cars. So VW managed to steal some of the market by picking off a the 'small car' segment with their Beetle. This took everybody by surprise.

Looking at the definitions above, you can see that this was not a guerrilla attack - as VW would have stolen customers away from GM with the Beetle. And although it is often cited as a classic flanking attack, I think technically it is a bypass attack, as GM were not in the small car segment. Regardless, it was very successful.

This was executed with the wonderfully different Bill Bernbach ad campaign - 'Think Small'.

VW Shadow Billboard

Haven't seen this before. Volkswagen's billboard throws a shadow onto the ground reading "Perfect day for a test drive".

Nice, although would be a bit risky to try here in Ireland given our weather.

Via Adsoftheworld.

The Great Pretender

I love this ad.