'Identify Harley Davidsons Strategy Essay\r'

'Harley is a globally recognised shop firmly associated with great motorbikes with a historic furiousness on expressive style, individuality and freedom rather than on engineering science, speed or sports. From a segmentation discern they belong in the heavyweight bicycle foodstuff and are particularly strong within a sub-segment of super heavyweight. Their bikes are strongest in the Cruiser motorcycle segment, feature in the Touring bikes segment (focus on their style and image) and through acquisition of Buell, now have a presence in the Performance models segment.\r\nThe Harley-Davidson image and the guest committedness earned and preserve by the curious ? Harley bring forth’ are its greatest assets. The appeal of the Harley grass was central to the corporate strategy. The focus of the strategy was to fortify and extend the relationship between the company and its consumers. The Harley Owners base was established to be a vehicle to tie in management, employee s and clients in a special community and to hold dear relationships and shared experiences towards a bonding with the marking and the company.\r\nThe loyalty of Harley owners is unequivocal in their repeat purchase demeanour ? oer 50% of sales between ’99 and ’05 were to previous owners, era provoker attraction helped history for a 20% share from first succession buyers. The brand was also successful in effecting a demographic and socioeconomic shift away from unsalted workers to middle-aged, higher income owners. Harley lagged behind its competitors in terms of scientific universe and rapid progress but insisted on playing the game on their home strengths of characteristic features and traditional designs.\r\nThey lacked the economies of scale of their competitors who could spread the greets of look for and development across higher unit volumes of crossroads and quadruplicate product lines. Instead they concentrated on incremental improvements to thei r engines, frames and gearboxes to increase reliability and power and reduce vibration. In 2006 they had 36 models available with lots of customisation options so that for each wiz purchaser could virtually have a change motorcycle. This captures their reconciliation between specialism and economies of scale ? a wide range of customisable options while standardising on cardinal components.\r\nSales of parts, accessories and merchandise had grown to a 20% share in 2000. Harley established a corpus development program to improve its distribution and coiffure it in support of the brands requirement for a stick outed ? Harley Experience’. The program increased support for stars while imposing higher standards of pre- and after-sales service and better dealer facilities. Training programs, test ride facilities, rider information classes were all initiatives designed to differentiate the Harley products from their competitors and success is evident with sustained demand.\ r\nNot all initiatives were so successful, the spirit of the Buell acquisition was to broaden the customer base by merging the comfort and style of a Harley patrol car with the performance attributes of a sports bike. While by no means a failure the Buell strategy has performed steady but has not attracted the same demand from the grocery store and annual shipments now approach just 12 to 13 thousand. Compare Harley’s resources and capabilities to those of Honda. What does your summary indicate for Harley’s potential to establish cost and differentiation advantage over Honda?\r\nHarley has continuously upgraded its manufacturing operations and invested in plant and machinery both to introduce advanced turn technologies and to expand capacity. Despite constant development and investment, Harley’s low production volumes relative to Honda and the other Nipponese manufacturers imposed severe cost disadvantages. They simply could not attain economies of scale t o match their large competitors. A related area was their weakness in buying power ?\r\nWhile not having the volumes with which to bargain step discounts Harley emphasised the internal roles of Purchasing Managers to foster close up relationships with suppliers. Honda, in particular, are renowned for their engine technology and they shag sustain continued engine innovation as they have a very large product range to which engines are central and over which the costs can be amortised much than easily. Harley moody to their own strengths and musical arrangemental capabilities to achieve cost efficiencies and product / brand differentiation. By utilising ?\r\nStrategic Innovation’ they chose to establish war-ridden advantage through creating encourage for customers from novel experiences, product delivery, customisation options and customer care. As a smaller organisation and one which adopted a non-hierarchical, team base structure, Harley successfully engineered a tra nsformation in employee committal and job satisfaction which also helped the company sustain this competitive advantage once it had been achieved. By ensuring that the ?Harley Experience’ was kept to a very high take aim it proved impossible for imitators or competitors to tap into the brand attractiveness.\r\nThe sustainability of Harleys differentiation is less vulnerable to being upturned by changes in the external environment and is more difficult to replicate. Harley differentiate on more than one plane ? their products certainly, but also their design, marketing and customer interactions ? have you ever seen a group of Honda owners father together BECAUSE they are Honda owners ? Way to go Harley. How can Harley D. sustain and enhance it’s competitive plant? The essence of differentiation advantage is to increase the perceived value of the offering to the customer either more effectively or at lower cost to competitors.\r\nThis requires that Harley continue t o match the requirements and preferences of customers with its own capacity for creating uniqueness. in(predicate) differentiation requires a combination of astute analysis and creative imagination. The Value Chain provides a serviceable framework for analysing differentiation advantage. By regularly analysing how value is created for customers and by systematically appraising the scope of each of the firms activities for achieving differentiation, the value-chain permits matching demand-side and supply-side sources of differentiation.\r\n'