Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/103759
INTERVIEW P66 RAY BLANK hard to measure the success of different types of marketing devices in this economy because it's hard to tell what works and what doesn't work. I don't know that promotion in and of itself or marketing per se, has as much of an impact as a 20-cent shift in gas prices. Everything is so influenced by the economy these days and the news of the economy… the media has a tremendous amount of influence today. It's really tough to say on the marketing side what formulatic approaches do or do not work. You said earlier that gas prices can have both a good affect and a bad affect on the industry… are you talking about the higher-end models? It's not so much the higherend stuff that struggles, I think it's more in the off-road market. Offroad products require transportation so if gas prices go up and you have an [Ford] F-250 with a trailer, you might think twice before spending 10 or 12 miles a gallon to pull a trailer 75 miles outside of town with some dirt bikes. It's certainly not the bike itself because everybody knows how economical they are to operate. You can run them all day long on just a few bucks worth of gasoline. But it's the transportation and incidentals along the way… where it used to cost $25 to go dirt bike riding; maybe it costs $150 right now. So is it the off-road market that has taken the biggest hit? It's almost all the categories 64-70 Blank Interview.indd 66 Remember when Honda had a big presence in AMA Superbike racing? Miguel Duhamel does. in general. If you just look at the numbers, the industry is down 50 percent from what it was a few years ago. Fifty percent… okay, if you look at it category by category, you would see that nothing is up over what it was in the past. No category is up, but you may see that one category is perhaps a little bit stronger than it might have been – expressed as a percentage of the total in terms of category share, but it's pretty much the same all over. It's heavily influenced by non-currents. As the non-current sell down for all manufacturers slows in light of a lack of non-current product, and consumers are faced with current-priced product, then you start to see another element brought to the overall situation of sales in motorcycles. Because, of course, everybody is looking for a deal and as many products haven't been revamped or modified or renewed in any way, the non-current model is every bit as desirable as the current model. When the non-currents are gone and the customer is faced with current pricing… the Yen's improvement against the dollar over the past few years has been rather dramatic: Some of the product was brought in at over 100 Yen to the dollar and we are currently trading at 80 Yen to the dollar so that's a 20 percent difference right there alone. That has some 7/15/11 3:44 PM