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Exclusive: Volkswagen's New Corporate Branding Scheme Revealed

Volkswagen may be grasping at straws here, but the not-so-well-oiled marketing machine in Wolfsburg has been firmly put in motion after the Dieselgate scandal.
Volkswagen 2016 brand claim 5 photos
Photo: VW - edited by autoevolution
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Sure, most people want Volkswagen first to fix those 11 million cars that were illegally sold to unsuspecting customers as having much lower NOx emissions and only after that improve its lost reputation by other means.

Apparently, things will happen a little bit differently, because the first order of business for the German car giant in 2016 is to change its corporate tagline.

Introduced back in 2007, the “Das Auto” motto wasn't exactly original, having been used by Opel for its Kadett line during the late '60s, but in recent years it had become synonymous with German vehicle engineering and Volkswagen in particular.

Not anymore, because starting this month, we can exclusively report that Volkswagen's new company motto going forward will be… Volkswagen.

We recently managed to have a look at an internal marketing document from the company - screenshots of which you can see in the adjacent gallery - and the way it was written sounds like “Das Auto” will become strictly verboten as early as January 2016.

The official announcement for this rather drastic marketing change is expected to be made on Monday, January 11, during a press conference at the 2016 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit.

The main reasons that VW gave for this move revolve around setting a “very clear signal: at Volkswagen, we are concentrating on the fundamentals: on holistic mobility offerings, on groundbreaking innovations, and on the needs of our customers.” Whoever was in charge of writing that phrase probably deserves a bonus, if you ask us.

Technically, you will still be able to see the “Das Auto” tagline on a lot of marketing materials until the end of 2016, but not even a single new commercial will show it ever again.

As it was somewhat expected, the move will coincide with a big push for electric concepts and production cars in the following years, one of the first steps in this direction being represented by the new Volkswagen Budd-e concept, which allegedly previews an upcoming production model.
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About the author: Alex Oagana
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Alex handled his first real steering wheel at the age of five (on a field) and started practicing "Scandinavian Flicks" at 14 (on non-public gravel roads). Following his time at the University of Journalism, he landed his first real job at the local franchise of Top Gear magazine a few years before Mircea (Panait). Not long after, Alex entered the New Media realm with the autoevolution.com project.
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