Wrong, the brand hung on and is dying out with boomers.
Everyone knows that the younger kids get crotch rockets.
It wasn’t the hold people that ruined the brand, it was the brand marketing to Boomers for shortsighted gains.
Harleys are for Boomers. Harley made sure that was the message.
Now they pay for it.
This is the reality for a lot of companies, they have built themselves around the baby boomers who are getting to old and dying off. They've all but ignored the younger generations and now must face the reality that soon no one will care about their brand and they'll wither and die just like their core demographic.
Even if millennials suddenly thought Harley was cool, they wouldn't have the money to afford one.
This article is romancing a company that has had consistent quality issues in the last few decades, sold its image out to WalMart in the 2000s, and doesn't appeal to modern riders.
The bikes were secondary to them being a media company. I wouldn't be surprised if they sold those bikes at a loss. I am not in their club, but their instructors were celebrities with celebrity-sized followings.
Even if people entirely stopped buying their bikes, they could be be acquired just for their content and brand.
That was under previous owners. They've since been bought out by a company that actually gives a damn. Unfortunately there's a good argument for too little, too late. The damage to the brand's reputation is immense.
They've been killing the brand name anyway with lower-quality products over the past few years. If they continued in that direction the brand wouldn't be worth anything.
Its success was mostly due to its novelty and exclusivity. After a while, copycats and their push for growth did them in.
Peloton is the same. They are first to market and have cultivated a level of exclusivity, but there is nothing unique about them that other businesses can’t copy over time (it’s already happening — most exercise companies now have their own Peloclones).
I am certain they are having a hard time getting customers in the younger demographics. For instance they rebranded their rewards program to “Nordy Club” in a ham fisted attempt to be hip. Just one telling example and I am sure they wasted millions on it.
I participated in the fundraising campaign of Vanmoof a few years ago. They were the market leader with a strong brand and financials. Possibly I considered it as my safest and a no-brainer investment.
Over the past few years I kept hearing there are issues with the bikes but I imagined such issues will be obviously addressed. Instead, they started expanding internationally (I read in comments they even had a presence in Japan!) while angry customers dealt with issues at home.
Really disappointed and a big reminder to prioritise product quality over growth at all costs. Vanmoof's desire to prematurely dominate the market turned into a fatal loss for all parties involved.
Heh, that's the secret branch-off of the brand lifecycle I guess. Companies that have, heretofore, fallen by the wayside or were unceremoniously erased from the collective conscience gets resurrected as a new, edgier brand.
It happened with Indian Motorcycles. Now, _that_ brand is known as the "rebel" brand (though it's ironically owned by a stodgy English private equity firm), while Harley-Davidson has slowly become the "fat yuppie or old fart (re)sowing their wild suburban oats" brand.
I bet you certain elements want to keep the embargo of Cuba by Americans going to keep the market for illicit cigars (and the requisite mystique of smoking one) going strong. Like the big to-do about absinthe. Now that it's semi-legal (as long as it doesn't contain x amount of thujone) it's become passe in the "cool" clubs.
Peloton is probably the weakest example possible of this since they took a very common and established word (for a group of people riding together) as their brand.
In more practical terms, back when PTON was still a stock darling, they constantly pushed how engaged their community was via Facebook groups, etc. so going after this would probably be a death knell signal that the magic is completely gone.
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