Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Lessons from Ten That Broke the Rules and Made It Big

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Getting to Radical

In 1982 Clyde Fessler was asked to start a club.
At the time, Fessler was the advertising and sales promotion manager at Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company, which was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Just recently repurchased from its parent company, AMF, by a die-hard group of thirteen Harley executives, the Milwaukee-based motorcycle company was on life support, barely breathing after a decade-long onslaught by the Japanese motorcycle makers and a continuing string of poor management decisions by AMF.
The Harley brand, once synonymous with freedom, rebellion, and red-blooded American individualism, had been tattered by years of poor quality, fierce competition, and a dwindling market. The last of what was once a group of more than two hundred American motorcycle manufacturers, Harley was clearly at its final reckoning. The company had just one more chance to grow from survival mode into a new era of prosperity.
Fessler was a member of the company's marketing strategy team. An outspoken iconoclast and a risk taker, he was very much like the other members of Harley's new management team. With minimal resources and amid harsh economic conditions, the team had taken on the daunting task of resuscitating the Harley brand.
Among other responsibilities, Fessler was asked by then chief executive, Vaughn Beals, to start a factory-sponsored club for Harley owners. What might have seemed a low-priority item for a struggling company was to become a critical marketing weapon for Harley.
Fessler understood the reasons why. In addition to being a Harley manager, he was also a Harley customer, a bearded, leather-clad biker who rode with packs ofHarley lovers and understood intimately the emotional attachments Harley owners felt to their bikes.
Even in the company's blackest days, a Harley-Davidson was more than a motorcycle--it was a way of life for its owner. And Harley had effectively transcended its 1950s image as the bike of choice for outlaw riders like the Hell's Angels. Harley riders might like beer and black leather jackets and boots, but they were honest, hardworking, law-abiding citizens. Fessler, of course, understood that Harley riders liked to gather, to ride, to rally and meet and swap tales about their bikes and their lives. This club would be an important link in reestablishing the bond between the company and its customers. More important, it would provide a community for the Harley nation.
Fessler foresaw a club that would be different. It would offer members perks like the ability to rent a Harley in any city where they might be traveling. It would have dozens of chapters so that customers all over the country could join a regional branch. It would join forces with a major charitable foundation and sponsor rallies around the country. And it would be called the Harley Owners Group, or HOG, a play on the popular name for Harleys. "Hog" had always had a negative connotation--a loud, obnoxious, road-hogging bike ridden by outlaw motorcycle gangs. But Fessler believed he could turn that negative into a positive by providing club members with an authentic identity they could proudly own.
HOG was officially introduced in 1983. Fessler met with the Harley dealers and designated a single dealership in each city or region as the host of the local HOG chapter. Newsletters and later a club magazine were used to communicate the few rules at the outset. In the spring of 1984, Fessler and Beals attended the first HOG rally in Gardenia, California; Fessler swallowed hard when only twenty-eight people showed up. He had hoped to build an organization of three hundred clubs across the United States that would boast 100,000 members. This was a humbling start. But despite its financial woes, Harley stayed with the club. Beals and the other Harley executives never faltered in supporting the club, and Fessler believed deeply in the "Field of Dreams" theory: "If you build it, they will come."
And come they did. Obviously, the club was just one factor in a series of strategic and radical decisions that fueled the company's remarkable rebirth. But as Harley-Davidson emerged from its brush with oblivion, stronger and more successful than ever, the club flourished beyond Fessler's richest fantasies.
Without an elaborate and expensive advertising campaign, Harley promoted the club through its dealer network with newsletters, posters, and word of mouth. Today HOG has more than 350,000 members and nearly 1,000 chapters around the world. The club sponsors hundreds of rallies each year, providing the structure and foundation for a worshipful and loyal Harley customer base. Every five years, HOG sponsors a massive birthday party for Harley-Davidson, an event entirely run and organized by employees inside Harley and volunteers from among HOG's members.
HOG is just one example of Harley's remarkable and decidedly nontraditional marketing prowess. And Harley is just one example of what we call "radical marketing." Simply stated, radical marketers are those who have achieved extraordinary success without the modern machinery of professional marketing. To be sure, Harley-Davidson today is a highly profitable corporation with a sophisticated marketing department and advertising know-how. In 1984, however, Harley-Davidson's limited resources were stretched as far as they could go. The company would reach this pinnacle by eschewing the traditional marketing formulas of giant brand-driven marketers like Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Walt Disney. Though most radical marketers lack the deep pockets and vast resources of the traditional marketing behemoths, their success is no accident.
Some of the techniques they use--tight brand control, for instance, and highly efficient customer loyalty programs--are those of classic marketing. But how they apply those strategies is radically different.


---- The Essence of Radical ----

In the hunt for radical marketers, we found an eclectic group of professionals--engineers, rock stars, lawyers, academics, consultants, technologists--whose resumes hardly resemble that of a professional marketer. If there was a single trait common to all the individuals identified, it was an exceptional level of intelligence. Another striking characteristic: most had no formal marketing background at all. Each in a sense invented the principles of marketing for himself or herself. Perhaps this is more than coincidence--with no formal marketing training, they drove their organizations to great success and achievement by ignoring academic marketing theories and bucking conventional wisdom.