Stop Dreaming, Start Riding! New Riding Course at Harley-Davidson Riding Academy Specially For Young Riders
The reason why we all love Harley-Davidson is, one, because of their great motorcycles, and two, their sentimental value. We’ve grown up with Harley-Davidson. Put up their posters on our childhood bedroom walls, dreamed of owning, at least riding, one because they were the ideal brand of motorcycles we aspired to have. They were ahead of the game.
Harley-Davidson challenges you to STOP DREAMING and START RIDING.
Now, it seems like they’re at the very back.
Just like how Atari came and went, so did Harley-Davidson’s popularity. Well, at least in this current generation. Sales have dropped as their original clientele aged along with them. The Motorcycle Industry Council said that about 46% of Harley riders are over the age of 50 and only 10% are in their early 30s.
Therefore, in an effort to attract more customers to the once-beloved motorcycle manufacturer, they have opened a ‘Riding Academy’.
The Milwaukee-based company launched the program in 2000 in about 50 locations. Currently, 245 U.S. dealerships now offer the three-to-four-day course, a quarter of which launched four years ago in 2014.
According to the company’s most recent earning report, Harley sold about 10,000 motorcycles less through nine months year than the same period last year. They are in obvious need of a reboot.The older generation may be easier to please, but the millennials of this current generation are hard to even read. They are multi-taskers – playing a video game one second, on Twitter the next – so it’s not so easy to find the right balance in a motorcycle that might appeal to their cluttered life. In addition to the not-so-great economy right now, millennials were not brought up like the previous generation, on dirt-bikes and motorcycle shoot-outs. We were born in the safe yet expansive cocoon of the Internet. And we haven’t travelled further since.
Jim Williams, Vice President of the American Motorcyclist Association, said that although “the younger generations are buying plenty of motorcycles”, they are not new.
On this, Heather Malenshek, Vice President of Marketing at Harley-Davidson, said, “I think we have to work harder to gain share of mind with young adults.
“For example, they're on screens, they're connecting socially, they're involved in gaming, they're involved in other things…they have other activities in their lives.”
On the different upbringing, Matthew Levatich, CEO of Harley-Davidson, encouraged employees to interact more with people and engage them in conversation about motorcycling whenever the opportunity arose.
(H-D Classics)
The company has already devised a plan on reaching the new age of riders with their gender-equal, advertising efforts. For example, they had the founder of the all-female motorcycle club ‘The Litas’, Jessica Haggett, to be a part of Harley’s social media advocates as they focused more on male-dominated sports like the X Games and UFC events.
The general cost of the Riding Academy classes is $300 with students learning about safety and the ranges one can learn to ride from “H-D certified coaches”. And although a student is provided with a bike suited for the course that they choose, they would still need to bring their own standard riding attire and a government-approved helmet.
For more information, you can visit their website here: Learn to Ride Harley Davidson