What you need to know:

• Volkswagen in partnership with agency DDB Sydney has taken the wrappers off chapter two of its Australian brand campaign play, ‘Batteries Included’, to mark the arrival of its first fully electric vehicles in this market.
• Human, emotional connection is the name of the game for Volkswagen – it's name literally translates as 'peoples' car' – and it’s trading on its 70-year Australian brand credentials, “twinkle in the eye” style of humour, people’s choice of car, and the pure joy of driving, as distinct brand assets to connect with Australian consumers.
• The latest campaign takes its cues from the ‘Let’s go for a drive’ brand campaign (chapter one), which launched last year, the first brand-led, locally produced campaign for Volkswagen in seven years.
• For Volkswagen Australia head of brand and marketing, Bianca Botma, brand first is the most effective marketing tool for the automotive brand in a cluttered, highly competitive automotive market that now includes 50-plus brands.
• It’s also necessary to overcome persistent barriers to EV acceptance in Australia, which remains in the single digit figures, per June 2025 car sales data.
• In terms of media mix, traditional channels are all in play for reach, but there’s also a fresh take on podcasts with this campaign and a commitment to targeted efforts too.  
• Volkswagen’s target customer is first and foremost the VW customer, but it’s also looking to grab a share of the families buying EVs as their second car.

Volkswagen’s brand team and agency partner, DDB Sydney, know there are deeply ingrained perception barriers such as range stopping Australians from adopting fully electric vehicles en masse that will take time and education to overcome. What’s more, the influx of new car brands and models in this market have created one very cluttered car yard, which makes buying a new vehicle more complex and confusing for Aussie consumers than ever.

It’s for these reasons and more that Volkswagen’s head of brand and marketing for passenger vehicles, Bianca Botma, and DDB Sydney head of brand performance, Michael Sinclair, are convinced leaning into a second chapter of a brand-led approach to reset and recharge Australia’s emotional connection with VW is the most effective marketing option as VW launches its first-ever EV range locally.  

Volkswagen and DDB debuted the ‘Let’s go for a drive’ brand positioning and inaugural campaign last year, tapping nostalgia, childhood memories, the joy of driving and VW’s quietly quirky humour as brand cues. It was the first brand campaign in seven years locally. The campaign features a smiling lighthouse keeper on a remote island driving to and from the letterbox in a VW, then asks the question: ‘What would you drive if you didn’t need to?’. It’s followed by the tagline, ‘Let’s go for a drive’.

“Being ‘great to drive’ is something Volkswagen needs to be synonymous with. It needs to be synonymous with quality, and it needs to be synonymous with value for money,” says Sinclair. “All of those things have started lifting since this campaign launched." For instance, since advertising activity ramped up in earnest this year, the proportion of people who believe VW 'provides good value for money' has increased 5 per cent, while those who believe VW 'makes good quality cars' increased by 4 per cent. Given the brand's share, both reflect sizeable lift. 

"We've got to be honest, a lot of that is also down to what Volkswagen as a business is doing – offering a great product that is very well priced. But we'd like to think the campaign has played a big role in getting people to reassess a brand they thought they knew that has actually gone through a lot of change over the last five years.”

The second chapter in VW’s brand approach is the campaign, ‘Batteries Included’, celebrates the arrival of its first three EV vehicles in Australia: The ID.4 Pro, ID.5 GTX and ID. Buzz. The narrative is all about evoking childhood joy and the emotional thrill of driving, enhanced by the tune, When I grow up, by Patsy Biscoe. The campaign rolled out from 6 July across digital, social and out-of-home channels.

“We say we are the people’s car. We really want to be approachable to the majority of the people. We want to build relationships with them for life, and give them the delightful experiences,” Botma tells Mi3. “We also focus on something we call the slight VW humour – the twinkle in the eye we always want campaigns to live and breathe, and bring back that joy for driving.

“So the brief to the agency was not to necessarily sell an EV in a product way, where you would expect all the benefits and the pros and cons of why you should or shouldn't buy an EV. But rather, buy into the VW brand, which people know is reliable and they trust. This is just another car that happens to be an EV. But it's VW, and you know the brand, who we are and what we stand for. We really wanted to focus on building that emotional connection with people before selling an EV per se.”

For Botma, the advertising play is about attraction, inviting people in. “It’s the rest of marketing's job when we drive them through the funnel, to make sure we are communicating all the product specific points,” she continues. “If you go onto YouTube, there will be product specific videos that will educate people on exactly why you would need to buy this car, the benefits of the car, how do you charge the car, our integrations with, for instance, Ampol, the chargers, the discounts we're giving them. The websites, social media, and all of those additional marketing efforts will then support educating people as to why VW EV specifically. But our first prompt, especially on TV and the broader awareness channels, is to always get that emotional connection and feeling with our customers first, then drive them through the education piece on why VW compared to the rest.”

Australia’s cluttered car yard

Adding weight to the argument for locally produced, brand-led campaign was deep research from The Lab and Kantar highlighting the need to cut through the clutter of Australia’s highly competitive, complex automotive market. There are more than 50 automotive brands in this market today, with newer Chinese car maker entrants such as Chery, MG and BYD all clamouring for share in recent years – and winning it. At the halfway stage of the year, BYD is up 145 per cent, and Chery a massive 229 per cent. MG is back 12 per cent, VW nearly is down 22 per cent as a swathe of established carmakers feel the heat of new competition.

Hence carmakers investing in brand.

“The simple summary is people are really confused. There are a few brands they’re not confused about, but on the whole, consumers walk in to look at a new car for the first time in five years and they’re surprised by what they find,” Sinclair says. “We need to go back to what Volkswagen has always stood for and refresh it. We’re in the lucky place where we're following the product; the product is great and unbeatable in a lot of ways. We just have to make sure the advertising is good enough to tell that story.”

Then there’s the volume of Australians still hesitant to invest in battery EVs. Electric vehicle (EV) sales, while slightly stronger in June 2025, remain at 7.7 per cent of total Australian sales in the year to date, compared to 8 per cent in 2024 and 7.4 per cent in 2023. This is despite more than 100 EV models being available in market. Plug-in hybrids, which have both a battery-powered motor and an engine and can usually drive in one mode or the other, are powering, with sales up 210 per cent for the first half across passenger, SUV and light commercial segments, though still representing a lower total overall than pure electrics. Hybrid cars (which are basically traditional internal combustion engine cars with a small 48v battery to make them slightly more efficient) were up 15 per cent.

Either way, growth in pure electric vehicle sales has slowed, just when carmakers have to reduce the overall emissions of their portfolio sales – or face steep penalties.

“What we recognise is a lot of those barriers are deeply ingrained, and they're going to take a lot of work to get through. People had really bad experiences early on in Australia, particularly with charging infrastructure. Getting certain people is just going to take that world to mature,” suggests Sinclair.

“But we entered this [campaign] with the confidence that actually, for the bulk of Australians, EVs are incredibly viable. They offer a great driving experience and great value. Volkswagen's pricing on this I would say is incredibly aggressive and incredibly inviting. Our hope is, when you see a brand like Volkswagen selling you an EV, you're ready to have a second look.”

Volkswagen is doing its best to back up the promise and established brand trust with solid EV product credentials. It’s created an assurance program, On EV, offering inclusions such as an eight-year battery warranty, optional health checks, modular battery packs, home electrification assistance, guaranteed future value alongside its finance solutions, and two-year specialist electric vehicle roadside assistance membership.

“The team have also internally looked at things like changing the test drive experience so Volkswagen is a more open, engaging, joyful, contemporary brand. It's the very beginning of the journey with this idea,” comments Sinclair.

As part of Australian 70-year celebrations, Volkswagen also demonstrated the claimed driving range of the ID.4 GTX (up to 544km) through a full circumnavigation drive around Australia, complete with live tracking and a Guinness World Record for the largest GPS drawing made by a vehicle.

Building the campaign platform

In arriving at the latest brand positioning approach, Sinclair points out three key drivers it’s used to enhance Volkswagen’s distinctiveness. The first is giving consumers a heightened feeling when driving the vehicle.

“That’s an engineering story that's been there since the 1970s,” he says. “Secondly, there's a thoroughness to Volkswagen that is rare. Once upon a time, we used to talk about German quality but manufacturing has moved on. Now, you have to combine that with an engineering philosophy that makes sure certain things aren't sacrificed.

“The final thing, which has been an interesting conversation with Bianca and the rest of the team, is we really believe Volkswagen has taste in a way that other brands don't. That manifests itself in a design philosophy that's been there for nearly 90 years. But it’s also in a restraint unusual for contemporary car brands.”

Sinclair adds a huge amount of budget has gone into refreshing the brand thinking. “Some of that naturally hits paid media. But in terms of our output, we’re far more brand focused than maybe in the last five or so years,” he says.  “Also, brand is needing to have an impact far more through the buying journey than it used to. It’s about making sure this all stitches together, reads as Volkswagen and leaves you with an impression. Credit to Bianca and the team: They've pushed beyond a lot of brands in any category in terms of their expectations for brand cohesiveness.”

As to the media flighting, while there’s plenty of traditional channels in there, Botma points to podcasts as a fresh element in play.

“That is where we will extend our conversations, where we bring our product experts talking on different podcast show. We're giving cars to these podcast hosts as well to experience themselves, and to have an authentic experience in our cars, and how they experience EVs in general, and VW car specifically,” she says. “We are trying holistically to tap into different avenues in terms of having a wide reach … It's important to attract as many people as we can. But then, depending where the customer is on their journey, we can become more specific. We are utilising traditional TV and digital TV, which is obviously growing. But also a very good footprint in terms of out-of-home with concepts that are really playful.”

Reading impact

To measure impact, Volkswagen is tapping Kantar to track unaided brand awareness, consideration and loyalty to the brand. Preference is another important metric.

“We are already seeing those early stats picking up – website tracking, the leads, which is the interest of customers saying, 'hey, call me back', or 'I want to book this test drive',” says Botma.  “We also tested the ‘Batteries Included’ campaign with Kantar prior to going live, and saw engagement and joy when watching this ad was extremely high, which is really positive in the early stages.”

Another vote of confidence for Botma is dealers have seen an increase in traffic to showroom floors following chapter one of the brand campaign work. “That’s great feedback, because you can't always track every single measure from a TV or billboard perspective,” she says. “Another thing we're tracking is dealer order intake.”

With Australia’s new National Electric Vehicle Strategy released in July, aimed at improving affordability and accessibility of EVs, establishing resources, systems and infrastructure to enable rapid EV uptake, and encouraging increased EV demand, Botma is expecting a new era for Australia’s EV market is on its way.  

“Yes, there's a lot of competition, especially with Chinese brands entering the market. We track all the different competitors and see what impact it has on the business. VW is still standing strong, but we are constantly evaluating our competitors to understand what impact they have on our share of voice, on our brands,” she adds. “We do, however, feel VW has a strong brand. We've been here for over 70 years. Some of these newer brands coming into the country don't necessarily have those brand values, that structure in terms of the dealerships, the support that's always been there for over 70 years. That also sets us apart.

“Having that known reliability and reputation we have in the market isn’t something these early adopters have. That does count towards us being a strong brand. But we do track macro environment situations, advertising, specific creative executions, to ensure we’re really thinking about how all the different aspects affect us as a business holistically.”

While existing VW customers are a target market, Botma equally has her sights set on those looking at EVs as a second family car who may not have considered the brand before.

“Early adopters might have gone to a Tesla, but there are the first early adopters in the VW brand as well,” she says.

Plus, with Tesla sales slumping globally and locally (it's back 39 per cent year to date in Australia), now is as good a time as any for rivals to try and muscle in.

“Some of the research is saying people are buying EV as their second car as well, not necessarily purely as their only car. We do want to retain our current VW customer portfolio, but then tap into the EV customers, which is not VW specific," per Botma. "We feel we can do with the strong product specification we've got at the price point that we were able to bring it to market.”