Tag Archives: powersports

us highland execs die in plane crash

US Highland Motorcycles COO Chase Bales, company President Mats Malmberg and CFO Damian Riddoch died in a plane wreck Saturday, July 10. According to initial news reports, their twin-engine aircraft, registered to and piloted by Mr. Bales, apparantly ran out of fuel and crashed short of the runway while attempting to land at Tulsa International Airport as they returned from a Pontiac, Michigan business trip.

us highland is an american motorcycle manufacturer

US Highland had just opened a new manufacturing facility in Tulsa for their critically acclaimed build-to-order motocross, supermoto, quad, enduro and dual sport high performance motorcycles. The May 30th open house drew international coverage, much of it focused on the innovative stainless frame and engine combinations offered by the Husqvarna inspired effort originally launched in Sweden.

US Highland is a genuine American manufacturer of high performance street and offroad motorcycles. Their proprietary four-stroke multi-valve engine design, available in either single or v-twin versions with displacements ranging from 250cc to an on the drawing board 1050cc, captured the attention of the trade in large part because of the significant advancement in EFI development by the Oklahoma startup.

mc mag folds; 30 years and out

In an announcement e-mailed – ironically, considering – June 18, Rick Campbell, Publisher and Editor of Motorcycle/ATV/UTV Industry Magazine(s) and the Powersports International Internet Expos (PIIE), will cease operations July 1, 2010. (www.mimag.com)

Campbell is the latest casualty in print’s war of attrition with online (digital) content, further hampered by a devastated powersports market in an overall struggling economy. The main culprit remains loss of ad revenue, the lifeblood of publishing and the sauce that has historically driven the presses.

announcement ends 30-year run

While MIM’s readership remained fairly constant, the same couldn’t be said for the B2B’s clients. Campbell recently took a big redesign step of downsizing from a tabloid format to a more conventional, more economical letter-based layout. The move bought time, but no new revenue. Continue reading →

goodbye, occ – good riddance

tlc ends the grotesque run of occ – sort of

In 2010, February 11th came four days after Cincinnati’s V-Twin Expo and fell on the eve of Dealernews Dealer Expo. It’s appropriate that we remember the airing on that date of The Learning Channel’s final episode of American Chopper, a Frankenstein-esque money-maker for cable “reality” whose success in years to come will be impossible to explain.

In 2002, only eight years earlier, the clan from Orange County, New York wheeled a trailer load of rollers and a few customer bikes into Indy and onto a 40×40 island off the main floor of a then still growing Dealer Expo. My recollection, from an advertising perspective, was of feeling faintly woozy at the woefully amateurish marketing, even by powersports’ minimal standards, of a nondescript collection of clones. Continue reading →

an unsustainable trend

sooner or later there's nothing left to shrink In today’s digital world there’s more time spent on measuring than creating. The word used is metrics, and it refers to how the bean counters parse a grasshopper’s head hair into a thousand different points of occasionally interesting reference.

Here’s one metric that doesn’t require an introducton or a powerpoint full of pie charts. I call it “fatness”.

The 2010 Motorcycle Product News Buyer’s Guide arrived in today’s mail – and it didn’t take Spidey Sense to figure out PDQ that the gas tank’s nearly empty.

My “fatness” index clearly proves that MPN’s Buyer’s Guide lost 3/16″ over the past 12 months, going from a still respectable 1/2″ in December, 2008, to an anemic 5/16″ in December, 2009. At one time this annual issue required a small burro to transport.

It’s no secret that A) advertisers are fleeing print and that B) powersports is leaking market like the Titanic took on ice water. This isn’t about any particular brand or channel. It’s just an honest take on a distressing trend that shows no signs of improvement.

As someone comfortable in either print or web I see a massive error in judgement in the stampeded abandonment of print advertising for the evolving medium of the internet. For a great take on how monster good advertising does work, and more importantly about how the entire retail conversation is interrelated, check the blog entry by Social Media guru Chris Brogan on his prediction about the future of retail.