Kick-Starting a Customer-Centric Revolution

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 customersThe Harley-Davidson website is a testament to the genius for knowing what makes customers tick, It radiates from every 1 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 g/emate 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 flyer '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 valuesMany 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 Hartey-Davidson; it's the fact that they see the product as a reflection of themselves. The loyalty and even love the customers have for the bikes was tested in the early 1 98Os when Hartey-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. …