This mighty organ does not, as you may've noticed, have a Letters Page. Which is perhaps just as well given some of the drivel I myself write which would under normal circumstances oblige our Steamed Ed. to waste reams of dead conifers carrying the spluttered outrage of aggrieved readers. But that doesn't mean this is a feedback-free zone, for I do occasionally talk to people who read this stuff and my beef about ageism in the June issue clearly evoked some resonance in certain quarters.Unfortunately none of the dealers and industry types who bent my ear about it wanted to go on the record, but not untypical of their responses was the story of an (unusually?) perceptive marketing manager going to his boss in the late 'eighties to make the point that perhaps one reason why their sales were dropping was because there were fewer youngsters getting bike licences, and in fact, as I myself was pointing out, that they should be targeting their marketing at older chaps. His MD carefully considered his theory for all of a nanosecond and sneered, "Well that's a load of bollocks, isn't it?"
Good to know then, that our importers are helmed by such open-minded individuals. Or at least were, because that particular MD is no longer in situ, but that anecdote and others like them prompted me to explore further a theme that, being an old codger myself, I'm obviously warming to.
And having let slip in that June column the appalling fact that I couldn't actually support my contentions with hard evidence (nothing new there, then), my first port of call was the MCIA to ask if they knew who was actually buying bikes in the UK. And they didn't. As is in they didn't know which socio-economic class indicators applied, e.g. A, B, C1, C2 etc., and they didn't have any age or gender-related data. As is in they didn't know which socio-economic class indicators applied, e.g. A, B, C1, C2 etc., and they didn't have any age or gender-related data.
Of the nation's 3.6million full motorcycle licence holders, 31-40 year-olds are the biggest single age band... all 714,000 of'em. And that's significantly more than the 676,000 souls in the 21-30 age group.
41-50 year-old riders number rather fewer, i.e. some 471,000, but this figure embraces a few interesting factoids, such as that there are exactly 18,008 more 43 year-old motorbicyclists than there are 33 year-olds. However the statistic that really hit me was the aggregate total for over 51 year-olds, which is 1.14million, representing a whopping 31.6% of the total motorcycling population.
Granted, this includes twenty thousand or so people over the age of 65 who probably don't ride much - if at all but the rest of 'em might reasonably be expected to throw a leg over something big and throbbing from time to time, and we're not talking about their long suffering spouses.
Sexist badinage aside, these figures surely support my June column's claim that the motorcycle trade's marketing whizz-kids - to say nowt of the magazines they pander to - ought to start some serious re-focussing, if for no other reason than government figures also reveal that the Over-45s are responsible for 40% of consumer spending and - get this - 65% of spending on new vehicles.
Although the MCIA may lack the will or the resources to provide such marketing analysis, there is an outfit that can... at a price of course. The research organisation CACI Ltd manages something some of us old media tarts are quite familiar with and which rejoices in the acronym ACORN, or A Classification Of Residential Neighbourhoods. Put simply, this divides the country into thousands of postcode locations and assesses the relative wealth and social rank of those who live in them, based on an increasingly sophisticated set of data.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders (SMMT), which is the four-wheeled equivalent of the MCIA, uses ACORN data on a more generalised level to assist their members, and together with the sort of info I got quite easily once I knew where to look - from the DfT, there seems to me no reason, other than funding, why the MCIA couldn't do the same. But in the meantime, step forward Honda and BMW as the bike industry's sole customers of ACORN-based research.
As respectively the biggest and poshest of the country's motorcycle importers, it's perhaps unsurprising that these two companies recognise the value of highly sophisticated, database driven marketing. And of course to greater or lesser extents, they both have the sort of solid, dedicated dealer networks to make proper use of it: there's little point in spending good money identifying new markets and new ways of reaching them if you're largely dependant on here-today / gone-tomorrow discount warehouses on the one hand and an ever shrinking band of disgruntled multi-franchise dealers on t'other to shift units for you.
So if the recent collapse of the Roissi operation taught anybody any long term lessons, which I sadly doubt, (apart from Honda who got their bikes out of 'em well sharp ish before it all fell over), then one of them should be that there's more to successfully marketing motorcycles than paring prices to the bone. And that certainly includes intelligently researching who your market actually is.