AKKU-Nachwuchspreis 2024
Birte Krüger (Düsseldorf)
Laudatio von Martin Lutz
Dear colleagues,
this year’s winner of the AKKU Nachwuchspreis – the award for the best final BA or MA thesis – goes to Birte Krüger from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.
Krüger submittet her BA thesis on “Autos und Emotionen – Die Werbung der BMW AG in den 1950er Jahren“ (in English:
Cars and Emotions. BMW’s advertising in the 1950s) in the spring of 2023. It focuses on the relationship between cars and emotions in the context of BMW’s
advertising strategies in the 1950s. Using the BMW “Isetta” model as a case, Krüger develops and ambitions and innovative framework to connect the recent
historiography on emotions with the literature on the rise of automotive consumerism in post-World War West Germany. More broadly, the author employs a cultural
approach to tackle the questions of how emotions were deliberately employed in BMW’s marketing strategies and how Isetta’s “image” was communicated to
potential customers.
The thesis follows a coherent and systematic structure and employs a wide array of primary sources from the BMW corporate archive. Krüger draws heavily on
the recent theoretical literature on emotions and places her case in the historical setting of the consumerism culture in the 1950s. The empirical analysis
is extensive and uses different sets of source categories. The first part on the internal construction of Isetta’s image is primarily based on textual records
and provides a meticulous overview of the intra-corporate discussions on developing a sound sales strategy as a dynamic process. The second empirical part
then makes use of the extensive photography collection at the BMW archive. Using an approach by historian Sarah Leonard, Krüger shows how that „even within
the narrow conventions of the genre”, BMW made specific “decisions about dress, comportment, touch and expression“. The long appendix provides ample evidence
of how thoroughly the author analyzes these images and constructs a convincing narrative of BMW’s marketing efforts. Among other categories, Krüger presents
material on leisure and vacation, women, urbanity and upward social mobility.
In concluding, the author contends that the case of Isetta shows how BMW successfully created and used an “emotional regime” in the capitalist democracy of the
early Federal Republic. At the same time, the Isetta model was rather an exception for BMW, as the firm was losing out in the competitive culture of consumerism
in the 1950s. Business historian Florian Triebel has argued that the Isetta did not “fit” into the overall branding strategy of BMW. Birte Krüger agrees with
Triebel but convincingly shows that that the Isetta advertisement was nonetheless emotionally appealing to the aspirations of a developing, modern, middle-class
consumer society.
While Birte Krüger advances her argument systematically, the thesis is also written in clear and engaging language. “Autos und Emotionen – Die Werbung der
BMW AG in den 1950er Jahren“ is a theoretically innovative, methodologically sound and empirically dense BA thesis. This AKKU award is well deserved.
Congratulations, Birte Krüger!
