What I Learned from Riding Motorcycles with My Son

By Paul Cowley, Owner, President, & Creative Director

07/30/2015

Last weekend, starting bright and early on Thursday morning, I embarked on an annual motorcycle trip with a few friends, and for the first time my son Jonathan! Everyone was looking forward to seeing Jonathan’s much anticipated, 2015 tricked out Triumph T-100. Jonathan, even as a little boy, was always the individual, everything had to be different from the crowd.

I too have a Triumph T-100, an English bike, which looks just like it did in the late 1960’s only a whole lot faster. Talk about the power of a brand. I can not count the times a 60-something guy would come up to me while pumping gas and ask, “What year is that Triumph? I had one back when I went to college!” or “I took my wife on our first date on that bike!” When I tell them “It’s a 2009,” they say, “I didn’t know they even made them any more, I thought Honda wiped them out back in the 70’s.”

Remember the, “You Meet The Nicest People On A Honda” ads that took America by storm? Honda killed it!

Which speaks to, you can have a great brand, but without advertising you’re dead in the water. If we had the Triumph for an account I would place full-page, T-100 ads in the AARP magazine 12 times a year and sit back and watch Triumph’s sales sore.

Triumph definitely has that brand magic, but are leaving all kinds of money on the table by not “inviting riders to the party” aka advertising.

I digress always thinking about business… Back to our trip…

…Jon’s bike is so tricked out, it looks like something out of the Mad Max movie, well not quite, but close. Needless to say, riding Triumphs with my son through the Adirondacks, cruising over Lake Champlain over and around the Green Mountain of Vermont was absolutely: Magical.

Next trip, Jonathan and I land in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in early September.

Looking forward to more of that magic, so stay tuned!