Cycle News

INTERVIEW DUCATI CEO CLAUDIO DOMENICALI P62 thing. It's a carefree kind of bike. You launched the Scram- bler with an 800cc air-cooled motor, but will you make a larger capacity version with the 1100cc DS engine? Well, even if we were going to, I wouldn't be able to talk about it now! In reviving the Scrambler name, Ducati could instead have made a born again classic such as the Bonnev- ille that's now the backbone of Triumph's range. In fact, Pierre Terblanche did design such a bike for you back in 2006 as part of the Sport Classic range of models which were Ducati's tribute to its past, though it was never produced because these didn't sell as well as expect- ed. Why weren't they success- ful commercially? I think there are plenty of rea- sons, firstly because they were really trying first and foremost to be a retro interpretation of classic era motorcycles. At the end of customers what it is you're of- fering them. There are so many products available nowadays for them to spend their money on. We're not just competing with other motorcycle manufactur- ers for the customer's money, but also against smartphones or winter sports equipment or travel abroad—there's a huge range of choice. So it's very important to get in touch with the consumer, and especially for the Scrambler we've used a lot of the new social media to market the product, like Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and so on. We've made a massive use of the many different tools available nowadays to contact po- tential customers and help them understand why this product, this brand could fit their expectations and meet their desires. So this is Ducati's true entry-level product? If you join the Scrambler family and get familiar with the bike, then you may decide in two-three years' time you want to experience a more sophisticated motorcycle. In that case what we advise is that you keep the Scrambler and then add a Ducati to your garage, because the very good point about a motor- cycle is that you can keep two or three quite different bikes in a garage, not like with cars where there are issues with space and cost. CN the day, we produce motorcy- cles. And sometimes the result of all our efforts is pretty good— sometimes it's good, sometimes it's average, and sometimes it's below expectation. I think that the current Scrambler is a very good inter- pretation of classic design in a modern context, a good mix of modern feeling with retro over- tones. And so when you look at the bike overall it's a better result than the Sport Classics were, which maybe weren't successful because they were too retro, and yet were just offered as a regular product without any special effort to sell them in terms of making customers understand what we were offering them. With the Scrambler we've tried hard to explain why this motorcycle is interesting. So that's the reason for the huge Scrambler market- ing campaign? Marketing is about trying to convey value, to explain to Ducati made a big push in marketing the Scrambler to the masses.

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