Jochen Zeitz
Analyst · Baird
Well, I think, affordability has not been a problem in the past. But when your used prices go down and your MSRP goes down, that obviously devalues the value of our bikes, and that’s what needed – needs to be corrected. So when you are making a significant investment into Harley-Davidson product, you want to make sure that your value is preserved and it doesn’t deteriorate from the moment you buy – you put the Harley-Davidson product. So I think affordability is relative. Some have said that we want to be exclusive. No, we don’t want to be exclusive. In fact, we want to be inclusive as a brand, but we want to protect the value of our products for our customers. And that is all built around the desirability, which we are managing with different metrics and as part of the next five-year strategic plan. I think, demographics, we also need to look at who has been buying Harley-Davidson in the past and who do we expect to buy Harley-Davidson in the future? And quite honestly, I think that we’ve had a more – a rather oversimplified view. Harley-Davidson is for those who share our mission and we call it the timeless pursuit of adventure, freedom for the soul, and that is regardless of age. And it’s important to remember that the customer targeting is so much more dynamic than actually looking at age. I’ve heard now so often that our consumer is aging out. Well, I’m aging, as they say, and I feel like riding right now. In fact, I would say, consumers are aging into riding, as they have more free time and resources, especially post this pandemic. And so Harley-Davidson is really more about attitude and emotion than agent demographics. And if you look at the data, that actually does show that people at the age of 30-plus over time age into riding, and that is critical. That is not to say that we will be attracting a lot of teenagers to our brand, that’s just not the focus of our company. But that being said, if you look at engagement or an incidence rate, that’s increased 1.5 times for young adults since 2010. And actually for 50-plus, it has increased over 2 times since 2010. So that’s the positive. And if you look then at sales of used and new bikes together, we’ve actually done really well in the second quarter. And that shows that there’s a huge amount of demand for our product. In 2019 alone, over 500,000 riders have purchased new and used bikes. We tend to focus only on new bikes, I think, that we need to change. So I’d say, affordability by protecting the value of our product, but not certainly by cheapening it and hence, focusing on desirability will be the future. Entry models, we will look into, but I will be talking more about that in our five-year strategic plan.