Five Questions with Volkswagen VP of Marketing and Strategy Rainer Michel

Five Questions with Volkswagen VP of Marketing and Strategy Rainer Michel The Volkswagen Beetle Convertible was VW’s biggest news at the L.A. Auto Show, and since we know all we need to know about the drop-top bug, we went a little off-topic when we pulled Rainer Michel, VP of Marking and Strategy, aside for an interview during the 2012 L.A. Auto Show.

Five Questions with Volkswagen VP of Marketing and Strategy Rainer Michel

Five Questions with Volkswagen VP of Marketing and Strategy Rainer Michel

 Five Questions with Volkswagen VP of Marketing and Strategy Rainer Michel

Five Questions with Volkswagen VP of Marketing and Strategy Rainer Michel

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Five Questions with Volkswagen VP of Marketing and Strategy Rainer Michel

Rainer Michel: “At the moment, we invested highly into the Passat. It’s very successful, and we have to keep this momentum and continue going with Jetta. We now have the Beetle and that is what we’ll concentrate on for now. Of course, we closely monitor the market, but at the moment we’ve really got to go with what we’ve got. The North American team is always open to great products, but for now we’ve got a huge task in front of us to keep the momentum going with our growth. This brand is liked in the United States, and we’ve got to deliver.”
On overtaking Toyota by the end of the decade:
RM: “We are a very small market player right now, and we don’t have [Toyota’s] pure size. So, even though we have a super big growth and we outpace…We’re still a small player. We have 3 percent market share, but with Passat went from 12,000 a year to now almost 10,000 per month — that is huge. We are totally on track with our plan. We are super-happy and also very satisfied with how the Passat is doing, given the size and where we came from.”
During the interview, Michel mentioned that the Tiguan is the fourth pillar of the growth in North America, with the others being Passat, Beetle, and Jetta. VW wants to raise awareness of its compact crossover offering, and what better way to do that than give it a little extra power with an R treatment?
MT: If the Tiguan is so important, why not bring a Tiguan R to the U.S.?
RM: “We have the Golf R, and to us it’s a very important halo vehicle for enthusiasts. We will never forget about our enthusiasts, so however many more R’s we do, that is something for the future. There are no decisions made, however, we very much support the idea. The R idea is something we very much continue to pursue.”
When you look at the hybrid market, [you see it’s] dominated mainly by compacts. And we put our chip on that with the Jetta Hybrid. At the moment we don’t have any decisions made or announcements [to make] about a Passat [hybrid], but on the other side, Volkswagen acts very fast. There’s a big shelf of technologies and innovations, but we want to see how things go with the Jetta and build on that first. I don’t exclude anything, and we are very flexible, but at the moment we will concentrate on that and we will have to see. We have the fully electric Golf for 2014, so with that and the feedback we get from the Jetta, we have options that we will look into in the future.”
Because we’re all familiar with VW’s fantastic superbowl ads (how can you forget Little Vader?), we had to ask what the automaker has in store for this year.
Michel smiled from ear to ear while manager of product & technology Mark Gilles took this question: “We’ve had a lot of success with the superbowl ads, and people seem to like what we do, so I’d expect we might be doing something along those lines.”
We’ll have to wait until next year’s big game to find out.