Volkswagen hasn’t been covering itself in glory over the past few years.

For one thing, the company needs a new marketing department.

Having narrowly recovered from cheating on its emissions tests with nearly half a million TDI diesel cars back in 2015, it’s been on a mission to recover a formerly passable reputation.

Or has it? The company tends to be out of touch with the times when it comes to its advertising campaigns.

Last year, the carmakers thought it would be okay to release an advert that showed women arguing over shoes while the men sat by doing the manly work of wishing they were driving a large car instead of suffering through it.

Volkswagen – keeping gender inequality alive since 1937.

After public backlash and a lesson on how not to be sexist, the company appears to have moved on to racism.

The Guardian outlines the latest scandal.

Volkswagen has withdrawn a Golf car advertisement posted on its official Instagram page that the company admitted was racist and insulting, saying it would investigate how it came about.

That’s a new approach. Pretending you don’t know where the advert that your company approved came from? I doubt that’s going to fly with the general public, but good effort.

The advertisement features a woman’s large, pale-skinned hands seeming to push and then flick a black man away from a shiny new, yellow Golf parked on a street. The man is flicked into a cafe called “Petit Colon”, a name with colonial overtones. In the background, jaunty music plays, along with sound effects resembling a computer game.

German television noted that the hand could be interpreted as making a “white power” gesture, while letters that appear on the screen afterwards briefly spell out a racist slur in German.

‘Petit colon’ translates as ‘little colonist’ or ‘little settler’. ‘N, E, G, E, R’, the first letters to appear after the hand flicks the man into the shop can be rearranged to form the German equivalent of the N-word.

They deleted the original advert from Instagram, but not before it made its way onto YouTube:

Juergen Stackmann, the VW brand’s board member for sales and marketing, and Elke Heitmueller, head of diversity management apologised.

“We understand the public outrage at this. Because we’re horrified, too. This video is an insult to all achievements of the civil rights movement. It is an insult to every decent person,” they wrote.

Correct.

“We at Volkswagen are aware of the historical origins and the guilt of our company during the Nazi regime. That is precisely why we resolutely oppose all forms of hatred, slander/propaganda and discrimination.”

If you’re aware of it, why does it keep happening?

The company has blamed the agency responsible for its advertising.

That argument will only get you so far.

[source:guardian]