John Schouten and James T. McAlexander ride the roads with HOGs. Not with the four-legged variety, but with Harley-Davidson Owners Groups, known in the motorcycling world as HOGs.
For two years, Mr. Schouten and Mr. McAlexander, marketing professors from Oregon, have been gathering research data at biker meets and living a sort of academic’s Easy Rider.
They study the subculture of Harley riders. They examine the purchasing patterns of a subculture based on common interests and values, rather than, say, ethnicity. And they are particularly interested in the subculture of Harley riders because it is one that has generated marketing ideas for a company.
Mr. Schouten says he and Mr. McAlexander, frequent collaborators, always keep two criteria in mind when designing research projects. First, will it make a contribution to their discipline? Second, will it be fun? “We have a pact that we will do no boring research,” Mr. Schouten says.
Mr. Schouten, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Portland, and Mr. McAlexander, who holds an equivalent position at Oregon State University, met in a doctoral program at the University of Utah in the early 1980’s. They have followed their principles since -- while both taught at Iowa State University and since both moved to Oregon with their families two years ago.
Studying the values, consumption interests, social structures, and rituals that unite “a bunch of guys with a common affection for Harleys,” Mr. Schouten admits, “might look pretty homespun to anthropologists and sociologists who’ve been using the same methods for a long time. But as far as consumer research goes, this is pretty new.”
However exotic, says Neal Higgins, assistant dean of the University of Portland School of Business Administration, “once you look at the research in detail it’s important material.”
“It’s more qualitative, opposed to the traditional quantitative approach,” he adds.
For members of the Harley subculture, the two scholars found, involvement becomes an obsession.
Originally, the Harley subculture was a countercultural world of gangs, like the Gypsy Jokers. The Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Mr. Schouten says, “has taken the creations of that subculture and more or less sanitized them.”
One HOG chapter the scholars rode with, Mr. McAlexander says, included a dentist, a lawyer, and some business owners. Another was primarily blue-collar. All share, he says, a strong sense of independence, patriotism, and “brotherhood on the road.” (Most HOGs are all-male, but there are a few for women.)
Harley-Davidson is now paying Mr. McAlexander and Mr. Schouten to analyze how it has reached its market. Their retainer is modest -- payments on a new Harley each. That arrangement came about after two Harley executives heard them present research in Amsterdam at the international meeting of the Association for Consumer Research, and flew them to Milwaukee to address Harley’s marketing group. All this before they had published their results in academic journals. They still haven’t, in fact, although they have several articles being reviewed.
Frank Cimermancic, Harley’s director of business planning, says ethnographic research is relatively suspect in the marketing world, but “we don’t have the hang-ups other companies do.” He adds: “We get information that we feel isn’t potentially colored as much as if we relied on our own employees.”
Mr. Schouten and Mr. McAlexander chose Harley-Davidson, which is not the only motorcycle with a subculture of enthusiasts, in part because it was the surviving American motorcycle company.
More important, a group of executives in the early 1980’s revived the company’s flagging fortunes in part by attracting a new market: baby boomers who fancy themselves born to be just as wild as the fabled Harley diehards, at least on dry weekends. It is the company, in fact, which sponsors HOGs.
The two professors have found that Harley has often taken its marketing lead from the users themselves. In the 1950’s, for example, it was riders who designed the extended forks and handlebars that became a Harley trademark.
Harley has also built on the old gang members’ Levi-type jackets, which had gang-I.D. patches. Now the company sells upscale black leather vests with patches, designed for HOG members. And even the term HOG is an appropriation of the slang that many gang members use to refer to motorcycles.
The professors say that consumer-behavior literature needs more studies of how an industry may broaden markets in this way. In the swimwear industry, for example, companies often poach ideas from trend-setting California surfers.
Have the two marketing professors “gone native”? They have joined a HOG. Mr. Schouten claims: “I still have been able to maintain a dispassionate eye.”
Mr. McAlexander, recalling a HOG ride around Lake Tahoe, says: “It was just beautiful. You see things and hear things and smell things you miss in a car. Yeah, I can see myself going native.”