After winning the MotoGP Triple Crown: The Rider, Team, and Manufacturer Championships, the factory Yamaha team finds itself in a difficult position looking for a title sponsor for next year. After Valentino Rossi’s departure to Ducati Corse for the 2011 season, Fiat, the team’s sponsor from 2007 until recently, dropped the Yamaha squad after its loss of the Italian rider (Fiat had long been associated with Yamaha because of the company’s desire to woo Rossi into the Ferrari Formula 1 team…that and the Italian helps sell the Italian made cars).

Perhaps under-appreciating the value of having Rossi on board a Yamaha bike in 2011, the tuning fork brand has now been left scrambling for a marquis name to help foot the bills for the next season. Despite having the reigning MotoGP World Champion Jorge Lorenzo and Rookie of the Year Ben Spies, deals with Petronas, Telefonica, and AirAsia have failed to materialize, despite lengthy rumor, meaning Yamaha’s corporate Blue/White livery might be spotted in Qatar (something reserved usually for non-sponsored wild card riders).

Branding can be a tricky trade, especially when it comes to putting your mark on someone else’s product. The optimal goal is to find partnerships where both products benefit from being associated with each other. For Agip, the Italian gasoline and oil company, the obvious perfect partnership is one with Hello Kitty, the cute white cat that does $1 billion in business each year. After all, who doesn’t like their 11 year-old Japanese girls mixed with three liters of motor lubricant? Oh yes, we went there.

Ducati has reported that the first 500 initial pre-orders for the 2010 Ducati Multistrada 1200 have been filled, and there is now a 60 day waiting period for the new sport-tourer. Citing a strong reception to the Multistrada’s “four-bikes-in-one” capability, Ducati sees an additional 500 units to be sold in the coming months. This last statement seems sort of like a no-brainer, after-all another 500 bikes will be sold eventually, right?

Actually, the entire statement is sort of strange when you consider what 500 pre-sold orders really entails in a markets like the United States & Canada. With a plethora of dealers in these countries, the reality is that this statement amounts to dealerships pre-selling their initial inventory, which consisted of one or two motorcycles. Yes, the Ducati Multistrada 1200 is sold-out for the next two month, but when you ship only 500 units to the entire North American market, you can almost guarantee being sold out on a bike during its release, right?

Australian Harley-Davidson dealer, Rocky Harley-Davidson, recently released some new videos on the internet to help promote their bar & shield apparel. After all, one can’t merely ride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, you have to have the appropriate clothing to fit your motorcycle lifestyle. The following is a loose interpretation of what the script looked like for one of those videos.

In our first scene, we see the protagonist dismount his thundering stead, with his Harley-Davidson shirt blazing like a forest fire. Confidently he walks by a bevy of women. Blonde, brunette, red head, it doesn’t matter…they are all powerless to resist the swagger and sex appeal that oozes from his cotton threads. These women are like deer in the headlights, waiting to be hit by his freight train of masculinity. This man, nay…God..walks down the street with his sunglasses firmly on at all times, keeping his gaze under control lest he fire laser from them at his next female victim, just like Cyclops from X-Men. Why? Because he’s seriously dangerous. Check the real thing after the jump, and yes…even a bonus video for the ladies.

Ducati owns probably the most valuable brand name in motorcycling, and like many brands Ducati finds ways to monetize this asset by licensing it out to other companies. One great marriage and example of this is the Ducati branded apparel available from Puma, which sees both brands benefitting from a racing/apparel association. One not so great example of this concept however is the Toshiba Satellite U500 Ducati Edition laptop, which sees the vanilla of portable computers get stamped with the mark of Corse Rosa.

Blasphemy, heresy, stupidity, sacrilege, un-American, and downright irreverence. Go ahead, get all those words out of your system. I’ll wait.

The default opinion of marketers, analysts, and the general population is that Harley-Davidson has one of the strongest brands in the United States, this being confirmed by the fact that every business student in America has studied Harley’s marketing efforts if they’ve ever taken a brand management course. So why would I start a three-part series on how to fix Harley-Davidson by arguing to change one of the most revered marketing houses in the motorcycle industry?

Giving credit where credit is due, Harley-Davidson, or I should say its admirers in business school academia, wrote the book on demand generation marketing geared towards the baby-boomer generation. However, in defending this market position, Harley-Davidson has painted itself into a corner by only engaging a very small segment of the population with its product. Unless they redefine and reposition their company image and who it resonates with, Harley-Davidson is going to watch the continued erosion of its footing in the motorcycle industry, and also the continued deterioration of its only industry leading quality: its brand.