“We wouldn’t be capable of telling that story without first having this moment to clear the air, to make the pivot,” Mr. Keogh said. “We couldn’t pretend it didn’t happen.”

Clever marketing has helped Volkswagen as far back as 1959, when its “Think Small” campaign — a contrast with the hard-sell tactics of the day from Julian Koenig of the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency — was as minimalist as the Beetle it was promoting.

That pitch helped reposition Volkswagen, dogged by its wartime association with Adolf Hitler, as “something that was warm and friendly and the antithesis of Nazi Germany,” said Tobe Berkovitz, an associate professor of advertising at Boston University.

“It absolutely wiped the slate for many people,” he said. “It was really revolutionary.”

Later campaigns, including “Lemon” and “Drivers Wanted,” kept Volkswagen fresh. But at the start of the decade, the brand seemed “out of step with America,” Mr. Keogh said, and it was ill equipped to react to the coverage of the emissions scandal.

Public outrage mounted in the weeks before Volkswagen came through with apology ads in some 30 American newspapers, including The New York Times. The campaign was seen as less contrite than other corporate confessionals, like the one Toyota aired during the 2010 Winter Olympics after recalling millions of vehicles. Instead, it was likened to a poorly received mea culpa from BP that showed its unpopular chief executive pledging to clean up an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico over a soundtrack of squawking sea gulls.

The new Volkswagen campaign does not go into the internal cultural deficiencies that enabled the cheating, such as a hierarchal structure that discouraged whistle-blowing. But Mr. Keogh said the company’s willingness to refer to the scandal at all in its marketing was a sign that Volkswagen’s culture was changing.

“We really needed a reason for people to root for us again,” the executive added.

Volkswagen’s sales started to rebound last year, thanks in part to the introduction of new sport utility vehicles, but have yet to catch up to pre-crisis levels. And even as the company has sought to regain the trust of car buyers, it has had to deal with accusations that it illegally sold prototype vehicles, as well as revelations that it financed tests of the effects of diesel exhaust on monkeys.