Sign up for afaqs! Newsletters
Harley Davidson’s balancing act of Millennials and Loyalists
The legendary brand seeks out digital and mobile to attract new riders.
The 114-year-old brand has succumbed to the charms of digital in a big way. In what is unconventional for it, the iconic motorcycle brand has just announced a video game set to release in March 2018.
The Crew 2, as the Ubisoft video game is named, is an open-road racing adventure. Scenarios include hopping on a Harley-Davidson Iron 883 motorcycle and weave through gridlocked Manhattan streets.
The Crew 2 follows The Crew, which became a hit, amassing 12 million players. Like its predecessor, Crew 2 is gender agnostic. According to the company, many children, by the time they’re 8 or 9 years old, have had “a motorcycle moment,” - they’ve been exposed to riding through someone they know or via a piece of pop culture and want to experience it for themselves. And The Crew is a no-risk environment to try that out.
This isn’t Harley’s first link to video games. It has embedded its motorcycles in Atari’s Test Drive Unlimited 2 and Sega’s King of the Road in the past. A new TV ad campaign with the tagline “All for freedom, freedom for all” aims to cultivate new audiences while still catering to the loyalists. The spots come from Team Ignite, a new IPG division.