By PETER THOEMING
19 June 2006

Santa Claus was busy last Christmas. The old bloke would have been up to his whiskers in heavy lifting, too, with Harley-Davidson December sales up by a staggering 71 per cent over the previous year. Santa delivered 562 Harleys, making a total of 4193 for the year in Australia. That’s a 23 per cent increase over 2004.

H-D’s Australian marketing manager Adrian O’Donoughue has a simple enough explanation.

‘Our strategy of introducing superb new motorcycles with loads of features and more affordable prices hit the mark,’ he says, and no doubt he has a point. But there was another new factor in play as well.

Harley-Davidson has been one of the few major motorcycle brands that didn’t own its Australian distributor. Gradually, over the years, most major brands have bought up or replaced the local distributors. H-D, Triumph and Ducati have been the exceptions for a while, and now there will be only two.

On the first of August this year, Harley-Davidson takes over the distribution of its bikes in Australia. In anticipation of that day the company has already been doing a fair bit of marketing and promotional work. This has clearly been successful, but it’s only a foretaste of what will happen when the company starts taking care of all the work that its three Australian distributors have previously done.

‘There will be no overnight change,’ says Australian managing director John Shingleton. With typical understatement he points out that there is perhaps not a lot of need for really major changes: ‘Harley-Davidson is not doing badly!’

But just because Shingleton sees ‘no overnight changes’ doesn’t mean that there will be no long-term improvements.

‘It’s business as usual, but over a longer period of time, Harley-Davidson will be better represented,’ says Shingleton. ‘We will be more aggressive with our marketing and promotion, we will improve training and parts supply and we’ll make sure that the appearance of the dealerships is better as well.’

Dealerships are obviously a critical element in the success of any motorcycle brand in Australia – or anywhere else.

‘We have a good base of dealers and a good network,’ says Shingleton. ‘We will build up the current network. Many of our 50 dealers have done an excellent job. But while dealer numbers will hardly change, we will be doing some fine tuning.’

That will obviously mean some dealers losing the franchise, but he insists that there is no intention to move to sole dealerships, selling only Harleys.

‘We want the representation of the brand to be really good,’ he says. ‘Our mission is to get the dealers to deliver the Harley-Davidson experience properly.

‘What we want to create is one of the premium automotive retailing networks in Australia. To do that we will not be cloning the USA; there’s just no market in Australia for the huge ‘destination’ dealerships they have over there.’

Despite the strong growth of the Harley-Davidson brand, Shingleton does not see it running out of potential buyers.

‘Almost every current motorcycle rider is a potential Harley-Davidson owner,’ he says.

Adrian O’Donoughue agrees.

‘As people mature, the potential for us grows. You can see the success of our policy of exposing more people to the brand from the sales growth of the past two years. Along with that, the expansion of the product range helps to spread the appeal to new groups. We plan to continue our aggressive product growth, expanding all the model families.’

John Shingleton should know what he’s doing. Between 1991 and ’96 he did a similar job for Land Rover.

‘I had to start from scratch,’ he says, although the British car brand was in rather worse shape than H-D. ‘I had a good team working for me. We had to get sales up quickly and dealers into good shape. We left them thriving.

‘But the team we have here at Harley-Davidson is every bit as good, in fact it’s probably stronger. It’s a young team with lots of motorcycle and Harley-Davidson experience, and a high proportion of women.’

Women are also a market where H-D is putting the runs on the board, as O’Donoughue points out.

‘In the past three or four years, Harley-Davidson’s percentage of women buyers has gone from 4 to 10 per cent,’ he says.

It looks as though Santa will be kept even busier with his Harley deliveries in Australia in future, filling lacy stockings as well as masculine ones.

BIKE NEWS SNIPPETS

LIES, DAMN LIES…

… and statistics. It seems that the organisation so keen on outlawing lane splitting, the Australian Road Rules Maintenance Group, has been stung by the huge wave of opposition this move has generated. Congratulations are due to Australia’s motorcyclists for that, by the way.

A lot of the feedback has been very simple: people wanted to see the statistics that proved the danger of lane splitting. There didn’t seem to be any.

Unfortunately, I’ve been told that the Group’s reaction to this request appears to be a little too simple as well. It’s been suggested that just about every crash that might possibly have involved some variety of lane splitting is now being counted as definitely being caused by the practice.

Keep an eye on the figures that come out, and keep asking for facts!

MISSION: POSSIBLE WITH TRIUMPH

Following the appearance of Triumph’s Speed Triple in the film Mission: Impossible 2, the avid motorcycle fan Tom Cruise is said to have personally requested another Trumpy for the latest instalment in the blockbuster series, Mission: Impossible 3.

The retro-styled machine is a one-off, created especially for the movie, and is based on the new Triumph Scrambler. It’s a good choice, because the bike has its roots in a machine made famous by another movie icon, Steve McQueen. McQueen was a keen motorcyclist and rode the Triumph TR6, the original Scrambler, in the International Six Day Trials in 1956.

‘The choice of a Triumph by Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt seals Triumph’s position as the bike of choice for the action adventurer’, says Triumph Australia.