Women Are the Future of the Motorcycle Market

THREE MEN AND A BABY BMW

Many years ago I attended a product planning meeting at a Japanese OEM to examine a new motorcycle from BMW. The bike promised to revolutionize the industry, because it was a motorcycle targeted specifically at women.

It was 2001, I was a junior motorcycle designer, and the organizer sounded terribly excited. However some of my colleagues were not. To many of them women were a motorcycle accessory, passengers or hangers-on, not a target audience. That kind of thinking was deeply frowned upon in progressive society, but could be openly communicated inside the halls of a motorcycle manufacturer where very few women were in positions of authority.

The bike was the F650 Scarver (F650CS in North America). A highly modified version of BMW’s best selling bike ever, the F650GS, the Scarver featured lots of semi-transparent plastic, soft contoured bodywork, a maintenance-free belt drive and a colour palette including one a friend christened “cosmetics counter blue”. It was heavier and slower than its F650GS cousin, and a lot more expensive.

(above-left) Some of the official tank storage accessories offered by BMW for the Scarver. (above-right) Probably the best application of all.

“BMW is going to dominate the women’s market” exclaimed the planner who called the meeting. The men were uncomfortable, pacing around, occasionally touching it like some alien artifact, judging if it was friendly or not. The fuel supply was in a tank under the seat, with the traditional tank space repurposed as a shallow storage bin, framed by transparent luggage rails.

“What goes here?” asked my boss, pointing to the storage bin. “A purse?”

There was some laughter, a few guffaws. Then the planner pocketed the keys and the meeting moved to a conference room where we looked at BMW’s marketing campaign for the Scarver. The media presented young, confident-looking professional women with the motorcycle, all in lifestyle magazines that had nothing to do with motorcycles.

(above) A BMW marketing ad for the F650CS. Shockingly modern and refreshing. Image courtesy of BMW Car Club of America

The Scarver was a sales flop and quietly disappeared as soon as the first production run was finished. The lesson most planners and design voices took away from the episode was that there was no market for a specific women’s motorcycle. But that dark conclusion, if looked at through a different lens, is illuminating.

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM WHERE WE TELL THEM

Since the invention of the motorcycle 120 years ago, women have been used primarily as tools to sell motorcycles to men, little more than wallpaper in a testosterone-soaked industry. Women were long considered physically and mentally incapable of operating motorcycles. After the second world war the message changed to suggest that motorcycles were beneath them, too dirty for the ideal 1950’s western, modern woman homemaker.

Occasionally, manufacturers suggested that a motorcycle could be a practical and stylish place for a woman to be seen. Piaggio and Honda made serious efforts to market the Vespa and Cub to everyone, targeting women specifically. But these were not “real” motorcycles according to the mainstream, and the marketing message implied that scooters were so easy to use that “even a woman could operate them”.

The mainstream marketing position in modern times is that women are sexual props on motorcycles, there to titillate male consumers. While not new or unique to motorcycling, the normalization of this has its roots in a poster campaign undertaken by NVT (the dying amalgamation of Norton, Villers and Triumph) in the 1970’s, when the desperate company scraped the bottom of the marketing barrel to try and stop flagging sales. Unsurprisingly, the pin-up girls didn’t save the company, but not before searing the image of a helpless bimbo into the collective aegis of the motorcycle marketing industry as the best way to promote bikes.

MARKETING PROVIDES SUPPORT, INSTEAD OF ILLUMINATION

With few exceptions, woman motorcyclists are considered a counter-culture anathema, slightly awkward misfits rather than heroic rebel-loners like their male counterparts. Even in socially progressive societies, women account for a scant few percent of motorcycle sales, while in much more chauvinistic countries like Italy, Spain, Brazil, India and China, where motorcycles and scooters are sold in their millions to a wide variety of consumers, they make up around 20%.

Are women so reluctant to buy and use motorcycles? The common industry wisdom says so.

(below) She’s in it for good fun… Image courtesy of OnTrack Media

Marketing assumes that since the proportion of women buyers is slight, they must not be attracted to motorcycles, therefore it’s not a market worth pursuing.

No market fit? The sales statistics say so, but we have heard this lame explanation before only ten years ago, when the industry claimed that there was no market for modern, exciting, small displacement motorcycles. Correlation does not imply causation.

OF CHICKENS AND EGGS

After the unexpected introduction of the Honda CBR125R in 2004, sales of small, modern, and sporty motorcycles shot through the roof. The tiny Honda became the overall best seller in Britain, of all places, a testosterone soaked motorcycle culture where power and speed are king. Today the same product planners and marketing experts who said there was no potential for small, great motorcycles loudly boost the thriving new 300cc to 500cc class.

For years there were few choices, and none of them were good. As recently as 2010 if North Americans wanted a bike that was small, light, affordable, and possessed forgiving handling you were forced onto an ugly old nail like the Suzuki GS500, Kawasaki EX250 or a Suzuki Savage. As a result sales of small bikes were terrible, leading to the misconception that no one wanted them.

(above) Perfectly competent but utterly undesirable, the Suzuki Savage is typical of the industry response to short legged or beginner riders who yearn for a big American style cruiser. Good luck when you outgrow its meagre performance.

When it comes to women on motorcycles, the situation is roughly parallel. If you you go by the statistics, women are buying only small, under-powered, and cheap motorcycles. Very few buy big or powerful machines, and the trend has been thus forever.

But the conclusion here shouldn’t be that there is no viable women-specific premium motorcycle market, but that women don’t like what’s currently available. The question to ask is “why not?” and find the hidden opportunity within.

WHAT WOMEN WANT

Many women love motorcycles too, and here is the unsurprising part: they love them in the same way men do. Every women motorcyclist polled by the companies I worked with over fifteen years responded to marketing and product planning questions precisely the same way as the men in the same group. They loved the freedom, the feeling of leaning into corners, the power, the speed and image of motorcycling. Period.

(above) Maria Herrea racing in the Moto3 Grand Prix world championship. Her diminutive size certainly does not hurt her competitiveness aboard a 100kg motorcycle. Image courtesy of Magmotores.com

The single issue that continued to separate the sexes was physical size, by which I mean seat height and center of gravity. Like any short person, riding a bike that is too tall and has a mass three times your body weight is a recipe for discomfort and anxiety.

This is not a new problem because men come in small sizes too. One of my best friends has been riding for twenty years, owned dozens of bikes, been a track day regular on a 250 grand prix replica and toured cross continent. But he’s 5’5”. Since the beginning he’s struggled to find quality motorcycle clothing that fits, or high performance motorcycles that he can ride for more than two or three hours without suffering joint pain.

This is 90% of the problem women motorcyclists face, except that unlike them, no dealer or manufacturer would deign to point my male friend to a lame “beginner” bike like a Savage as a viable option because simply because of its low seat. Both men and women are anxious about riding a bike that is too big. But when a woman walks into a showroom, inevitably she is expected to settle for what is available “in her size”.

My male friend has decades of skill and knows what he wants: the same awesome, attractive, exciting machinery the rest of us do. Unsurprisingly, the same goes for most women motorcyclists. When the marketplace presents even choices, such as in China or India where the average sizes between the sexes is less pronounced, and all the motorcycles have low seat heights, sales to women are much higher.

FOR THE LOVE OF MONEY

The marketing departments of OEMs follow the path of least resistance, particularly in North America, because it’s felt that the reward is not worth the risk of pushing for something better. As with small-engined motorcycles before, the current sales facts don’t reflect that conclusion.

The motorcycle industry narrative condescends to tell women what their relationship to motorcycles should be rather than let them choose for themselves.

In all modern economies women are outpacing men in higher education, while female graduates outnumber men in key high value professions like medicine and law. Across the spectrum, the millennial generation presents a growing tide of affluent, sophisticated and aggressive female consumers that will finally close the gender gap in economics and political power.

(above) BMW, perhaps, gets it more right than any other brand.

Women already outspend their male counterparts and exert greater influence on household spending and product trends. Ignoring this market segment to pander to men is not only counter productive but will almost certainly weaken the viability of the motorcycle as a mainstream product.

As the developing world gets richer, the core motorcycle buying population aspires to car ownership, just as it did in the west during the post war years. In China and India, the two largest motorcycle markets in the world, this is already happening.

The pool of potential consumers is shrinking, so ignoring 50% of the population is leaving 50% of potential sales on the table. Why would any business do this?

Given those facts, manufacturers would do well to design desirable, high power, high technology motorcycles that are physically accessible to shorter, lighter customers, and make an effort to market them using real women enjoying bikes for their own sake.

The most alluring feature of a motorcycle, the factor that most influences consumer’s attitude towards a brand, is not size of the engine nor the aggression implied in the advertising, it is the style and character of the people associated with riding it. The first brand to get confident young women on it’s motorcycles in any number will reap a sales and branding harvest the likes of which has not been seen by this industry in a very long time.

The brands that continue to use women as objects? They will get left far, far behind.

___________________________________________________________________About the author

Michael Uhlarik is an international award-winning motorcycle designer with 16 years of experience creating bikes for Yamaha, Aprilia, Piaggio, Derbi and many others. He is a veteran motorcycle industry analyst and part-time industrial design lecturer. He is based in Nova Scotia.