For Both Its Traditional Riders and These New Prospects, Harley is deploying every tool in the digital marketing kit, from Facebook pages to online video showing actual rides from behind the handlebars of all Harley models. But more than most brands, Harley’s marketing depends on getting prospects to make skin contact with its products. Ads create interest and awareness; but it’s sitting on a Harley that creates desire.
Many of the promotions and most of the direct marketing the company does are funneled through its dealerships. (True, the company has links to the Harley Owners Group, whose 1 million-plus global members pay $45 a year to belong, but they don’t require much marketing.) In the efforts to penetrate new customer segments, Harley dealers are key partners.
For example, the company worked with dealers to develop a new in-store marketing initiative called the Fit Shop. Rolling out now, Harley Fit Shop is a specially designated area of the sales floor where sales people and their tech crews will work with customers — specifically non-traditional Harley owners — to customize their new rides for comfort and manageability.
Dealers got a full panoply of collateral materials with which to promote Fit Shop — everything from brochures and hang tags to license plates, customizable postcards and uniform patches.
They were also an integral component of a Harley sales promotion that ran from December 2008 through last March. Under the terms of that deal, customers who bought a new Harley in the Sportster line and rode it for a year could then trade it in for full credit toward the price of one of Harley’s larger heavyweight cycles.
The promotion was apparently a success — so much so that dealerships are complaining about a fall-off in sales since its end, and some have started offering their own discounts to compensate.
Harley dealers are reportedly also feeling squeezed by a growing number of repossessed cycles available at auction, eroding the normally stable resale price for used bikes. While many of these are available only to dealers, some third-party remarketers have opened their auctions to the public.
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