The Piaggio Group is reporting an 11.2% increase in its first quarter 2010 sales across its motorcycle and scooter subsidiaries compared to last year’s numbers. The group netted €2.9 million for Q1, which is noticable increase from its €4.7 million loss in Q1 of 2009. For motorcycle sales alone, the company saw a 12.4% increase unit sales, with the European market leading the charge.
The Motorcycle Industry Council has released the latest figures on motorcycle and industry sales for the first quarter of 2010, and the figures show a 21% decrease in motorcycle sales compared to 2009, with the industry as a whole posting a 23% loss. These statistics paint a continued doom and gloom scenario for the motorcycle industry, but there is a silver lining in the March 2010 numbers, which show an increase in some segments, and a slowing decline in the rest. Check after the jump for a full breakdown.
Harley-Davidson has announced its Q1 quarterly earnings today, and the Milwaukee-based company posted a $68.7 million profit. This news comes after Harley-Davidson posted a $218 million loss last quarter, and finished in the hole over $55 million for the 2009 year. Harley’s return to profitability is partially due to the company’s restructuring of its financial services, which are once again generating money for the iconic American brand. Harley-Davidson Financial Services posted a profit of $26.7 million this past quarter, almost a third of HD’s net income in Q1.
There is no doubt at this point that Harley-Davidson needs to engage new markets and customers in order for the company to continue to succeed. Along this vein, the Milwaukee brand recently retained the services of Sassenbach Advertising to help push the biker message out onto the internet. With virtually no budget, a computer, and a webcam, the German ad agency engaged over 170,000 people per week with the Harley-Davidson brand message “Sorry I’m on the Road” on Chatroulette, the latest internet craze.
Next up on our diatribe of motorcycle marketing gone bad, we have Italian manufacturer Aprilia Motorcycles. In an attempt to latch onto this whole “internet” thing they’ve been hearing people talk about outside of the office, the Piaggio Group member has discovered the FaceTubeSpace’s of the .com revolution as a great marketing medium. Hoping for just one killer hit on the interwebs, we have the following video, aptly titled “Aprilia Dorsoduro 750 Factory viral”, which clearly shows the intent behind its production.
Aprilia, here’s a free tip: viral videos historic never include the word “viral” in the title. The video isn’t a bad concept at all (does everyone get the part about how riding the Dorsoduro Factory is like a roller-coaster?), and we love the 2010 Aprilia Dorsoduro Factory as a bike, but with low production budgeting, and 300 views as of this writing, we’re thinking this advertisement isn’t quite living up to its hype. Check the video out after the jump (and be sure to send it to all your friends).
Quirky Italian motorcycle manufacturer Moto Morini has reportedly been saved from the chopping block by Paolo Berlusconi. If that names rings a bell, it should because Berlusconi is the brother to Italy’s Prime Minister, and owns Garelli scooters. The Italian businessman has also been recently linked to acquiring MV Agusta, which if both transactions go through could see Berlusconi owning the parts of a formidable Italian motorcycle company. Berlusconi has reportedly made a €2.9 million offer for Moto Morini which includes the company name, infrastructure, and rights to past and future product lines.
Editor’s Note: This guest post by David Emmett was originally posted on his site MotoMatters under the title of “Editor’s Blog: Old And New – How Media Is Changing”. We thought Emmett was so on-point with his assessment of the use of the internet and social media in motorcycle racing, and the industry as a whole, that we asked him to reproduce his post here on Asphalt & Rubber. To put his post in complete context, Emmett just finished working this weekend as Fiat-Yamaha’s live blogger during the Qatar GP, where he wrote, tweeted, and hustled his way around the MotoGP paddock as the only online journalist with a permanent Dorna press pass. For more of an account of his time in Qatar, and for all your other racing news needs, you should visit his site at MotoMatters.com (after first reading Asphalt & Rubber first of course).
The comment that I have probably received most since I started this blog was “I want your job!” And frankly, I have to pinch myself to see if this is still all really happening, so it is a sentiment I can completely understand. Being allowed to work in the MotoGP paddock and up in the press room feels like a genuine privilege, and being surrounded with people who share the same passion is truly remarkable.
I often wonder at how this all came about. Just over four years ago, I posted a season preview on the Adventure Rider motorcycle forum, and now, I learned today, I am the first journalist from an online publication ever to receive a permanent pass from Dorna. In the intervening years I have worked hard both to keep learning as much as I can about racing, and communicate my passion for the sport to a wider audience. It has cost me blood, sweat, tears, and more money than I like to think about, but all these would have been to no avail if it wasn’t for one factor: The Internet.
35 motorcycles, 7 model lines, 4 chassis, 3 motor families, & 1 market segment, that’s Harley-Davidson’s product line by the numbers. Where many large production motorcycle companies might have 30 or so motorcycles that span the entire gamut of motorcycling’s different sub-markets, Harley-Davidson has put all of its eggs in the heavy cruiser market. This singular pursuit of one market segment has not only been the cause for Harley’s success, but also a significant contributing factor to the company’s recent downfall, which has led to a recently rumored leveraged buyout.
As the old idiom goes, one should not put all their eggs in one basket, which is exactly the faux pas being committed here by Harley-Davidson in its product offering. Businesses, especially public ones, should always have an eye on sustained long-term growth, and a key element to that goal is a well-diversified position in their appropriate industry. Taking this lens and applying it to Harley-Davidson, one can immediately see a portfolio that has been extensively mismanaged by focusing on only one segment of the total motorcycle industry: the heavy cruiser market.
What this has effectively created is a motorcycle company that looks like Alfred Hitchcock’s take on Baskin Robins: 31 flavors, but they’re all Rocky Road.
It’s been our long standing view that Volkswagen entering into the motorcycle realm after it’s 20% stake in Suzuki is purely a work of fiction fabricated by bored journalists. The majority opinion is that Volkswagen acquired an interest in Suzuki (who also makes cars) to gain a better foothold in developing countries where smaller vehicles with smaller displacements are king.
This sentiment hasn’t stopped others from believing that there could be more collaboration between the two marks in making a two-wheeled vehicle, and the latest rumor pegs Volkswagen’s Martin Winterkorn, Chairman of the Board of Director of Management of Volkswagen AG, as saying explicitly saying just that…of course, no one actually has him on the record with that statement.
While the US motorcycle market posted a 36% decline last month compared to a year ago, BMW was busy posting up some impressive numbers. The German company is reporting its February 2010 sales numbers are up 52% compared to February 2009. The main reason for the surge: the 2010 BMW S1000RR superbike, which would make BMW’s gamble of competing head-to-head with the Japanese Four a venerable victory. More after the jump.
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.