When Bill Berbanch contributed to creating the Volkswagen brand in the United States, there were still 30 years to go before the Brand began to talk about the Brand as a symbolic phenomenon in the relationship between society-consumption-advertising.
The discipline that we know today as branding has a long history without the model or theory that supports it having any real importance in that long period.
The earliest antecedent dates back to 1837 when partners Procter & Gamble, in Cincinnati, Ohio, decided to attach a name (Ivory) and a wrapper (Packaging) to their soap loaf.
Bill Berbanch (1911-1982) changed the paradigm of advertising persuasion and therefore of the commercialization of products and services and unknowingly - perhaps - inaugurated the era of brand communication.
For the Madison Avenue advertisers of the 50s, the post-war years, the “baby boom”, the main activity of advertising was to make known, to spread, the new products. Creativity was in the hands of the General Electric engineers who invented washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, vacuum cleaners and everything else that plugged in and made the life of the "housewife" more practical and also consumed energy, which was the new and most wonderful business coming from new technologies associated with oil, gas, steel and thermoelectric plants.
Brands were names to identify products.
The Banks had names since they were born in the squares of Florence in the Middle Ages because those names, generally of powerful millionaires, generated CONFIDENCE. People's names were already trademarks. That is why the Morgan bank was from Morgan, the cars were called Ford and the companies were named after their owners and founders, such as Procter, Gamble, the Lever brothers, the Johnson family and their children, and King Camp Gillette himself. that not only did he name his products, but he attached his face with his mustaches to each package.
Products, like people, are distinguished by more than just their names. And Berbanch in his daily work warned that these products needed more than just being remembered by their names.
In 1960 it was very difficult to imagine that a German car, designed in Germany, protected by a German “monster”, whose literal translation is “people's car” (it only remains to say German) could be sold by tens, or by thousands, in North American territory, bought by Americans and driven by Americans.
That was the great challenge that Bill Berbanch accepted. sell, or rather, convince Americans to buy a German car, but not only German, but the most German of cars. Large agencies and also others not so large had not accepted the advertising business offered by Volkswagen managers. Berbanch, a Jew created in the Jewish suburb of Brooklyn, from the brotherhood of the most persecuted and assassinated by Hitler, was the one who accepted the challenge of Volkswagen, above all, with a not very succulent advertising investment budget.
Volkswagen, as a brand, can be analyzed, with the criteria of modern branding.For example, for Wilensky, Volkswagen would lack a name that is easily pronounced for any North American, from the East, West, North or South. Its identity, that is, the formal elements that defined the brand, were undoubtedly negative for American society. German origin (who had killed thousands of American soldiers, leaving widows and mothers disconsolate), aspect of beetle (unattractive bug in the sight of all), small and with little space. Economical, a negligible virtue for the eight-cylinder Chevrolet, Cadillac, Oldsmobile and Ford and with a bumper-to-tail size of almost five meters. The personality was not more appreciable: the people's car, designed with the help of Hitler, opaque colors, uncomfortable, with a small front trunk and a dash without buttons.
We can learn from Berbanch today, half a century after the best advertising man of all time achieved the miracle of repositioning a brand whose symbolic value was minus zero in the best-selling foreign brand car in the US.
We have to take into account that, in its own way, communication is one of the fundamental tools to build a brand. In 1960 and now too.
When Berbanch left Gray Advertising to open his own agency, the new technology was called television and those who began to use and understand the advertising possibilities of that medium did so with the experience of radio, that is, putting images to words, or music, that is to say jingles.
Bill understood that the viewer was different in relation to the listener
The emotions produced by the mixture of images and sound required the complete attention of those who settled in the living room of their house or later on the TV set or television space in the house. The Funeral commercial for WV was a demonstration of that sensitivity to which he added a fine humor, a subtle humor, different from the great appearances of the great car brands in the special music shows.
But Berbanch's great revolution was graphics. In the principles that Berbanch never wrote in a book, as David Ogilvy did, there were two basic orientations for creatives: economy in the story and simplicity.
Berbanch did not dismiss investigations, as was once said
Only he didn't put what the investigations said in his ads. The investigations served to get to know people better, not to repeat in the ads what they said in the focus groups, which at that time began to proliferate.
This introduction to the idea of branding ends with a constant that creatives learned from Bill: logic and rationalization are not necessary to create an advertising idea that, basically, must move. For this reason, Berbanch's ads were always characterized by finding “the difference”. Other advertisers of the time called that difference in other ways. For Leo Burnett it was "the inherent drama of the product" or for Ogilvy the "Brand image". Among the three they defined the advertising that built very good businesses for large, medium and small advertisers, _________
By: Marcelo Cosin. - IdelaM Brand Institute.
