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The motorcycle company Harley-Davidson knows its customers and it knows not only how to win them, but how to keep them. As their US website says, “It’s one thing for people to buy your products; it’s another for them to tattoo your company’s name on their arm.” And that’s exactly what Harley-Davidson’s most devoted customers do. The company interacts with its customers at numerous touch-points: by phone, in the showroom, on the road, at bikers’ conventions, in shops that sell biker clothes featuring the Harley-Davidson logo and so on.

However, arguably the best and most comprehensive ‘portal’ into the Harley-Davidson world is the organisation’s website. The insights it offers into how Harley-Davidson sees its customers and strives to interact with them have implications for many other vertical sectors (business-to-business just as much as consumer) that are far removed from the world of motorbikes.

The Harley-Davidson website unashamedly seeks to be far more than just a website that sells motorbikes. Instead, it’s a world. The design and content of the site is all about enticing the surfer into a motorcyclist-friendly utopia that, in a sense, is as compact, coherent and comprehensive as The Lord of the Rings is for a lover of fantasy novels. The whole emphasis of the website is consciously to pay homage to the culture and world of the biker and is so comprehensive, sincere and imaginative that it’s easy even for the non-biker to be convinced it isn’t a fantasy at all. And isn’t there a lesson there for managers all over the world?

A genuine liking for customers

The Harley-Davidson website is a testament to the genius for knowing what makes customers tick. It radiates from every pixel. It seems that any negative comment about, for example, the dangers of motorcycling and the likelihood sometimes of bad weather would just make the detractor seem like a killjoy. It’s entertaining – even for people who would never want to get on a motorbike. It also illustrates just how close Harley-Davidson is to its customers: the point is that few other organisations have websites that show just how seamless that relationship is. So many other businesses, even successful ones, are unaware that their websites make it painfully obvious they see their customers as completely distinct from them.

Such genuine empathy, genuine closeness and genuine liking for customers are surprisingly rare in business. It’s most in evidence when an organisation has managed to give the impression that its customers belong to a sort of club the organisation operates. Loyalty cards and frequent fl yer ‘clubs’ try to offer this impression, sometimes fairly successfully although very often you can see the blatant marketing motive too close to the surface. Many organisations have specialised customer ‘clubs’; Tesco has its Healthy Living and Wine Clubs, for example. Even children’s books are in on the act: many publishers have cleverly created clubs children can join to get special information about their literary heroes.

Harley-Davidson’s passion for its customers, linked with the quality of its engineering has enabled it to face tough times within the motorcycle industry and to maintain an enviable status and profitability as the last remaining mass market manufacturer of motorcycles in the US, against intense Japanese competition.

Shared brand values

Many companies generate customer loyalty although not many achieve the level of customer enthusiasm Harley wins. Nor can it all just be down to their website. Maybe a vital point here relates to shared brand values. It’s not just the product itself that attracts people to Harley-Davidson; it’s the fact that they see the product as a refl ection of themselves. The loyalty and even love the customers have for the bikes was tested in the early 1980s when Harley-Davidson began to make subtle changes to the design of their much-loved motorcycles in order to give them more appeal to a new generation of bikers.

Very often, as Coca-Cola found to its cost, tinkering with a product to which customers are unnervingly loyal is a dangerous strategy. In fact Harley-Davidson didn’t lose loyalty, but managed to retain its customers during and after this re-design process due to its perceived closeness to its customers. After all, what other organisation’s founder’s grandson - William G. Davidson - would spend time at Harley-Davidson conventions sporting a beard, black leathers and jeans in order to discuss the finer points of the bike design with his customers?

Davidson had an important responsibility for the styling and redesign and he went into the marketplace to bikers’ conventions and talked to his customers face-to-face, not through the artificial constructs of focus groups and marketing committees. His most devoted customers know everything there is to know about the curve of the handlebars, the look of the engines and the design of the ignition system. They told Davidson how they wanted the bike, their bike, to look and feel. Davidson likened the process of communicating with his customers as akin to being in the fashion business.

A natural question arises: why doesn’t every product or brand inspire the kind of loyalty Harley-Davidson wins from so many of its customers?

There are doubtless many answers to this. Certainly, some of the reason has to do with the very nature of what Harley-Davidson is selling. Bikers tend to be passionate about their hobby (some see it almost as a profession) and as their bikes are the centre piece of their passion, they’re likely to feel just as passionate about the manufacturer of their bike. Not that this means Harley-Davidson had an easy job responding to and capitalising on, that potential for passion. But certainly it’s hard to imagine anyone, still less a biker feeling equally passionateabout the utility company they use.

The real reason most organisations don’t foster such a level of love from their customers is that they too easily allow themselves to lose sight of who their customers are and what they truly want.

How often do we really take the trouble to see our company, services and products through the eyes of our customers? How can we hope to stay close to our customers without placing them at the centre of everything we do? In truth, how do we become truly customer-focused, or - to use a more literal and in many respects more helpful term – ‘customer–centric’?

It’s a term that I would define as placing the customer at the very heart of the business. In other words, everything you do is done with your customer in mind – not slavishly, not done as a chore, not done because your boss will be cross if you don’t. Instead, you put your customers at the heart of what you do because you know that is what being in business is all about. The practice and philosophy of Customer Centricity can be distilled into three principles, which are as follows:

• Dedicate everything you do to meeting the customer’s needs: You need to ensure that everything you, your staff and your suppliers do and provide through whatever channel, has the customer in mind.
• Know and understand your market and learn to love it: You need to know and understand your market as intimately and as closely as you know anything in your life that you love. And if you don’t love your market now, or are not prepared to learn to love it, why are you doing this job at all? Go and find something to do that you will love.
• Be agile: Yesterday’s sales are history. What are your customers looking for now? You need to ensure that you, your staff and your supply base are ready and willing to adapt. In these fast-changing times there are two types of business – those that respond and thrive and those that just survive. Keep up with what your customers need now. The secret is to be flexible, to be able to turn on a sixpence, to respond quickly to customer needs and so give your customers reasons to love you now and to keep on loving you.

Learn these lessons and put them into practice creatively, sincerely and authentically in your organisation and you’ll kick-start a new momentum and ride off into the sunrise of your business – not the sunset.

This article appeared in Manager in Winter 2009.

Please read more about our work in Customer Centricity at our Customer Centricity portal.