American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 171 October 2013 | Page 4

It is the brand that sells, not the metal
EACTION to Harley-Davidson's new model range has been
mixed. Purists citing 'Jelly Mold' cosmetics and sterile styling
as the company recycles itself in search of buyers-of-bland;
while dealers and consumers with money are motivated by the
reassuring familiarity and warm embrace of Harley's 'biking-lite'
lifestyle packaging.
What is interesting is that those (mostly of the purist persuasion) who criticized
the company for whoring the brand up to 2007 through unsustainably large
output and outlet numbers are noticeably quiet now.
The trick that Harley-Davidson has performed in the past five years has been
an object lesson in survival excellence. Balance sheet house-keeping has been
combined with classic brand management in which everything appears to have
changed, while in reality very little has changed.
Perception is everything and by taking ownership of
how the brand is perceived it matters not that the
message delivered in the past 36 to 48 months is
actually not that different to what went before - quite
the opposite in fact.
The brand loyalty the company has sought to
engender has been among those who previously
perceived the brand to represent the ultimate outsider
statement, and looked covetously at those who were inside its values.
Those outsiders merely wanted to be invited in, and Harley's marketing has
done exactly that - those who perceived the brand as one that could bring a
frisson of 'edge' to their lives now have ownership and will jealously guard that
territory with just the same proprietary instincts displayed by all the previous
generations of outsiders who found the weather on the inside to their liking.
ood brand management is about carefully manicuring a message for an
equally carefully groomed community of individually targeted wallet-books.
In these days of the 'Twitterati' and the oxymoron of mass social media
predicated on individual self expression and exposure, it is tempting to assume
that the wheel of customer reach has been re-invented. But it hasn't.
All that has happened is that a new generation of marketing executives have
discovered the self-same self-evident truisms of so-called outreach that every
generation of their predecessors have stumbled upon, and those are the self same
golden rules of selling that has underpinned customer grooming (sorry, I mean
marketing of course!) ever since the Sumerians carved the first beer recipe with
the then cutting edge technology of hammer, chisels, stone and glyphs.
None of this is to say that the new generation(s) of buyers that Harley is
harnessing are 'same old same old' anymore than Harley's own product offer is
identikit.
If you compare the 2014s to the last few years then, liquid cooled tourer
engines notwithstanding, there has been evolution of their offer - all be it gradual

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and subtle rather than revolutionary (as it should be and is for most motorcycle
manufacturers).
Standing them alongside the pre-recession boom-time products of ten years
ago shows just how much distance can be travelled incrementally in a relatively
short time.
ast month I described the market's new customers as 'digital boomers' - a
concept that neatly encapsulates the idea that while everything changes,
nothing changes. Yes, the buyers emerging into the sweet-spot of our median
demographic this decade are ones who have known nothing but the digital age,
nothing but a wired world of instant communication and gratification.
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