International Dealer News IDN 139 October/November 2017 | Page 4

• COMMENT • COMMENT • COMMENT • COMMENT • COMMENT • COMMENT • Don't just meet demand, create the demand! ven though the Euro 3 pre-registered inventory as at December 31st 2016 will have (mostly) been sold, earning valuable income for dealers, it has been a disappointing year so far for new motorcycle registrations in most of Europe. As seen elsewhere in this edition of IDN, sales in Italy and France are doing well (very well in the case of Italy), but even there the market performance feels fragile. Despite the (theoretically) improving economic picture in most of Europe (especially in the Euro currency zone), the outlook is no less certain now than it was five years ago. While many are pointing to the massively changing landscape in which transport and leisure spend markets find themselves, there has always been change. Indeed, the time to worry is when stability smells more like stagnation. Maybe the “lost decade” has meant that we have double or triple “change impactors” crowding in on us now, and whereas it is often quite difficult to be able to actually identify the change that we know is taking place about us, now the speed and degree is so marked, the impacts so revolutionary, that we are back in an equivalent of the early days of the automotive and motorcycle industries in terms of just how fast and far the market is going to change. In the past, or certainly in the second half of the twentieth century, the reassuring foundation has always been that regardless of what happened in economic, socio-political or technological terms, people would still want to feel the wind in their hair and burn those hydrocarbons. But as Harley-Davidson CEO Matt Levatich so eloquently put it in his keynote speech at AIMExpo in Columbus, Ohio, in September, it is no longer about the hardware so much as being about the software, namely people and their leisure choices, and that our real competition is the screen and its apps and games – smartphone, the tablet, the games console. It actually matters not which piece of digital hardware is top of the food chain at any one time, it is the fact that that is the space where our future consumers live now. o, the way forward has to be to marry the experience of the screen with the experience of riding, and that is why initiatives and technology such as rider communications, head-up-displays, V-2-V collision avoidance, automatic gearboxes, infotainment systems, and the kind of tech foreshadowed on concept projects such as BMW’s Vision Next 100 are so important – “all of the excitement of today's bikes, but none of the danger,” as one reviewer put it. The purists will place a huge question mark over the “excitement” element of that thinking, but there is no question that just as Boomers embraced the E e-start and oil-tight cases, so too the consumers of the future just won’t really “get it” where trying to reconcile a considerable investment of hard-earned cash into something that could just as readily kill as excite them is concerned. In fact, speaking as a Boomer, I personally don’t think self-balancing tyres and joined up thinking between suspension, tyres, steering, ABS and ECU can come soon enough. As to whether all this will be enough to tempt today’s youth market off the couch, as Scott Wine, CEO of Polaris Industries, thought it could be in his AIMExpo keynote remains to be seen. The X-Factor remains the experience, and contrary to many OE marketing executives in the motorcycle industry, that is not something that can be pre-packed and be just the swipe of a card away. The ‘Millennials’ and ‘Gen Z’ (or ‘Centennials’) who will follow them into the Malls and (hopefully) motorcycle dealerships of the future will, just like the Boomers and all prior generations, make up their own minds about what is or is not “authentic” to them, their aspirations and values. ur job is actually a lot simpler than the BS o f t h e s o - c a l l e d “ m a r ke t i n g professionals” would have you believe (yes, including many of you reading this inside the market’s leading OEMs). Find out what the consumer can be sold (not what he or she wants - that is something completely different and utterly misleading), and then go and make the best product you can at the best price/value equation possible. The art of capitalism, ever since people first discovered the profits to be had from trading surpluses, has not been simply to meet demand, but to create demand. It would appear that this fundamental defining characteristic of selling is no longer understood by those climbing the greasy pole of their marketing careers or those who teach them. our X-Factor is the experience O S Robin Bradley Publisher [email protected]