Now that Harley Davidson has no more trendy Hollywood types to buy their overpriced bikes, Harley will have to face the reality of building a reliable and powerful motorcycle of its own merit. Not an underpowered, heavy and unreliable bike resting on the unearned laurels of an age long past.
Harleys are already extremely overpriced in the United States where they don’t have any import tariffs. But the bigger problem is that they have cemeteries full of customers.
According to a recent Harley-Davidson study, in 1987 half of all Harley riders were under age 35. However, by 2006, only 15 percent of Harley buyers were under 35, and as of 2005, the median age had risen to 46.7. In 2008, Harley-Davidson stopped disclosing the average age of riders; at this point it was 48 years old.
In 1987, the median household income of a Harley-Davidson rider was $38,000. By 1997, the median household income for those riders had more than doubled, to $83,000.
Many Harley-Davidson Clubs exist nowadays around the world; the oldest one, founded in 1928, is in Prague.
Harley-Davidson attracts a loyal brand community, with licensing of the Harley-Davidson logo accounting for almost 5 percent of the company’s net revenue ($41 million in 2004). Harley-Davidson supplies many American police forces with their motorcycle fleets.
From its founding, Harley-Davidson had worked to brand its motorcycles as respectable and refined products, with ads that showed what motorcycling writer Fred Rau called “refined-looking ladies with parasols, and men in conservative suits as the target market”. The 1906 Harley-Davidson’s effective, and polite, muffler was emphasized in advertisements with the nickname “The Silent Gray Fellow”. That began to shift in the 1960s, partially in response to the clean-cut motorcyclist portrayed in Honda’s “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” campaign, when Harley-Davidson sought to draw a contrast with Honda by underscoring the more working-class, macho, and even a little anti-social attitude associated with motorcycling’s dark side. With the 1971 FX Super Glide, the company embraced, rather than distanced, itself from chopper style, and the counterculture custom Harley scene. Their marketing cultivated the “bad boy” image of biker and motorcycle clubs, and to a point, even outlaw or one-percenter motorcycle clubs.
