Backmarker: Reinventing Brands, Growing Markets

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the Super Bowl. As a Canuck, I know that the NFL field’s too small, and U.S. football has one too many downs. But having spent 15+ years in the ad business, I always watch this one game, because it’s really an advertising festival that includes a sporting event.

I again pondered the absence of any motorcycle ads in the broadcast. The lack of advertising vision and daring in our industry is a dead Clydesdale I’ve already flogged, and I wasn’t going to bring it up again.

But not long afterward, I had an interesting conversation with Mike Kidd, who is running AMA Pro Racing’s Flat Track series, post-DMG takeover. Our conversation was skewed toward the marketing challenge/opportunity he faces, but it was wide-ranging.

Mike reminded me that in the early ’80s, he rode a Honda Ascot for a TV commercial that ran during the last episode of M.A.S.H. That final episode was, in 1983, the most-watched television show of all time—a bigger television event than the Super Bowl in its day.

About twenty years earlier, Honda had unveiled its “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” ad during the Academy Awards. Sponsoring that telecast had taken almost all the company’s U.S. advertising budget, but it worked. And the next year, they advertised in the Super Bowl. Those were all high-profile, expensive television advertising investments, but they had real impact in terms of driving dealer traffic and went a long way toward redefining the public perception of motorcycling as a whole. So a motorcycle ad in this year’s Super Bowl would not have been unprecedented.

Although I don’t think the original, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” commercial is available on the internet, there are some quaint vintage spots on YouTube, including this one starring a young John Travolta.

Of course, at well over $2 million per 30-second spot, it would be easy for any OEM’s VP of Marketing to pooh-pooh my idea. “Are you crazy?” I can imagine them saying, “When business is so bad?!” But every brand that advertised in this year’s big game is facing the same recession we are. While a few advertisers pulled out, new ones took their spots.

In fairness, I don’t really expect companies like Ducati or Kawasaki to pony up that kind of money. Only Harley-Davidson and Honda could even dream of it. This week the Motorcycle Industry Council announced overall industry sales fell 7% from 2007 to ’08, but that’s misleading. Sales were bucked up by high gasoline prices last summer. Right now, the trend lines are all terrible—so it would have taken a lot of guts for marcom executives at either of the two motorcycle behemoths to even suggest it, and it would be a board-level decision. Anyone who dared push for a Super Bowl ad would be putting his job on the line.

But if not now, when?

Mike told me a funny story about taking a bunch of Clear Channel execs to a big flat track race—I think it was one that Ronnie Jones promoted in Oklahoma City—and having these guys all come away awestruck and saying, “We can sell this!”

“I said, ‘Yes but our audience is dying,’” Mike recounted. “And they said, ‘That’s okay, this is a great show—we can sell it.’”

Mike told me that it took a few minutes for him to explain to those guys that he wasn’t using the phrase, ‘Our audience is dying’ as a figure of speech. He meant; they were literally aging and dying off.

Bridgestone might be the MotoGP control tire, but the company focused its Super Bowl ads on four-wheel products. In this one, we see that even in the distant future, off-roaders’ behavior will infuriate environmentalists!

That’s the problem flat track has, and it’s a problem our entire industry has. The average age of motorcycle buyers and riders is aging almost one year for each passing calendar year. We’re not attracting new motorcyclists at anywhere near the rate we need to sustain the sales levels we achieved over the last few years.

The world of marketing and advertising is in flux right now, frantically trying to redefine itself in the Web 2.0 world. The motorcycle media are not immune. The truth is, most of those new “alt.strategies” work to raise mindshare within niche markets. They don’t grow the markets; they don’t encourage new people to start thinking of themselves as, say, potential motorcyclists. Filling the hopper—bringing new shoppers to the store: that’s where advertising still works, which is why I would have loved to see a motorcycle ad in the Super Bowl. After all, every potential new motorcyclist in America was watching.

My conversation with Mike Kidd will take me quite a while to transcribe and clean up, so I’ll post most of it next week. But suffice to say, I think he’s a good man for the job. As an ex-Grand National champ, he’s obviously got the respect of the participants. He knows what it takes to build up a series, having created Arenacross. He’s had a chance to practice building a flat track series, having worked on Formula USA’s flat track deal. He spent enough time away from the sport to come back to it with a fresh perspective. He has realistic expectations and no illusions about the challenges the sport faces, especially now when sponsors are cutting budgets and hunkering down.

You could argue (as many did, including me) that the AMA Superbike series that DMG took over needed some serious tweaking, in terms of the actual racing product. One team utterly dominated the premier class, and the class structure included two confusingly similar 600cc divisions and two confusingly similar 1000cc categories, often featuring the same riders on the same bikes.

That’s not really been true in flat track. I admit, the Harley-Davidson XR750 has won every half-mile and mile race since God-knows-when, but the racing’s still thrilling and unpredictable. “We can sell this,” indeed.

Another early ’70s spot. Ten years after “You meet the nicest people…” the message is still the same - only cornier.

When you read Kidd’s insights in more detail next week, you’ll learn that AMA Pro Racing’s Flat Track series faces a classic marketing and branding challenge. It’s like some of the old brands that have sponsored flat track over the years. Think of Beer Nuts for example; Beer Nuts are great! I love Beer Nuts, but I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I actually bought any. It’s a grand old product identity that still resonates with lifelong customers, though those are dying off. The challenge is to tweak the old brand enough to appeal to new, younger customers without alienating the existing base.

We don’t need to reinvent the racing; we need to reinvent the brand. Come back next week, and AGV Backmarker will do its tiny bit to help us get off on the right foot. Which of course, for flat track racing, would be the left one.