09-28-2020, 06:56 PM
(09-28-2020, 09:35 AM)Frulk_imp Wrote: As the old joke goes... Harley is a clothing company that dabbles in motorcycles. I would point out that at my local Honda multi brand motorcycle dealer where I bought the CB 2/3rds of the floor is dedicated to atvs/UTVs. They’ve also branched out to selling trailers for those. I’m betting if the Honda dealer didn’t have atv/UTV and trailer sales to prop them up they too would be looking at some hard business decisions.
Harley.... tractor like... Honda...soulless...etc etc. We can keep this tribal silliness up all day.
Great post. This is a study in two very different ways to go about things and the impact that the ever dwindling popularity of motorcycling in this country has had on each approach.
Harley-Davidson made a conscious decision to reinvent themselves as a lifestyle company. They stuck firmly to their core product and marketed everything else associated with that product for all they were worth. This paid off incredibly well for them for quite some period of time and paved the way for their bloated pricing. That makes for quite the Catch-22 these days. Were they to slash their prices in half, there would likely be considerable damage done to the brand. It's one of those strange things about lifestyle products.
The ever-dwindling popularity of motorcycling is proving to be challenge enough for all motorcycle companies (the rise in sales since the beginning of the pandemic aside). But in the case of H-D, they are also facing the ever-dwindling base of hardcore H-D types. Sadly for H-D hat's more or less the only customer base they have to work with. In other words, I'm guessing that those "casual buyers" out there don't tend to set foot in a Harley-Davidson dealership. Even if the popularity of motorcycling weren't in the toilet, once all the boomers are gone H-D would likely still be struggling. It's a real double-whammy for them.
Honda on the other hand (or Honda Powersports to be more specific), focused on continued diversification of their product offerings. It would be interesting to see the sales figures as it seems that for many parts of the country motorcycles are no longer Honda Powersports' core product. For those areas it seems the core product would instead be the ATV's and SXS's based on what many here are saying. Such a move by Harley-Davidson would have likely been a turn-off for a very large portion of their customer base.
Followed up by this excellent post:
(09-28-2020, 01:46 PM)Frulk_imp Wrote: Oh the irony....being slow is by far the number one complaint lodged against the CB....and primitive not being far behind that. As in air cooled...retro dual shock rear suspension etc.
They fact that the CB is on or very near the bottom of 0-60 times for production bikes for its cc class (and let’s not mention bikes at even half its displacement) doesn’t really seem to bother most people on this site that ride it. I certainly don’t think about how slow and primitive it is when I’m in the saddle of the CB.
I’m betting a large part of the HD crowd thinks the same way about their rolling iron as we do about ours.
The irony is even deeper when you stop to consider the fact that the CB1100 was specifically created in order to compete directly with Harley Davidson's offerings in Japan (along with the large displacement offerings from Ducati). To those who can't help but poke fun at H-D at every possible opportunity, I sincerely would like to know were you in charge of keeping the company afloat, what moves would you make?