AIMExpo 2023: Show Daily | Friday

Friday featured the last two Disruptive Thinking presentations, before lunch and the final few hours of the show. After that, it was time to begin moving out and start looking ahead to 2024.

Jared Burt, Cinnamon Kernes, Andy Leisner, and Andre Albert

Market ExpansionWhat Another Outdoor Industry is Doing

The motorcycle industry isn’t the only one looking to grow its market and reach new customers. Up on the main stage Friday morning was Andy Leisner, chief consumer officer for the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. He spoke about what the diving industry is doing and noted that there are similarities between riders and divers. Both have interest in outdoor adventure and both generally have above-average income.

Joining Leisner – a former pro road racer, Cycle World publisher, and MIC board member – were Cinnamon Kernes, MIC vice president of market expansion and events, and Andre Albert, MIC director of sales and marketing. Moderating the panel was Jared Burt of Herohub.

“PADI is a unique organization,” Leisner said. “We’re sort of like the MSF, and we’re sort of like the MIC, and we’re sort of like an OEM. The dive center is like a motorcycle dealership. They sell…all the gear but they also do the training in-house. It’s like if we had an MSF instructor at every motorcycle dealer in the country.”

Among the challenges, he said, is that there aren’t oceans everywhere for enthusiasts to dive, so the diving industry has to make some special efforts to reach potential customers.

“My job has been to come in and develop our relationship with the consumer,” Leisner said. “We spent the better part of four months basically analyzing our audiences. Who are the people most likely to come over? We focused on…young, Gen Z, outdoors oriented…interested in conservation.”

Beside the youth market, the second type of customer getting attention from PADI are former divers, likely older and with families, who can be reactivated and brought back into the water. Albert, a lapsed diver himself, wondered how quickly a diver or rider needs to be re-engaged before losing them for long periods.

Inspiring both young people and former enthusiasts requires repeated attempts, Leisner said.

“In today’s world, people are exposed to more than 1,000 marketing messages per day,” he said. “People don’t start noticing a particular message until they’ve seen it five times. Frequency is key.”

Kernes said that the motorcycle industry has typically placed too much focus on the machines and not the people riding them. Ride With Us, the industry’s market expansion initiative developed at the MIC, is about the motorcycling lifestyle and community, she said, and dealers have an important role to play.

“Dive centers…are the gateway to getting people into the water,” she said. “That’s what our dealers are (for motorcycling). That’s one thing we want to continue: connecting with our dealers, getting them engaged, and getting them involved in helping grow our industry.”

Leisner said that PADI has a marketing toolkit for dive centers around the world, and the organization asks these shops to be welcoming, open, and enthusiastic, with an aim of converting visitors into divers.

Kernes and Albert discussed Ride With Us marketing materials being developed to show that a motorcyclist can be anyone. And the materials will inspire people to try. The hands-on, half-hour Ride With Us Moto Intro sessions being offered at selected locations nationwide give first-timers a chance to sample a small motorcycle, on a temporary riding range, with the guidance of Motorcycle Safety Foundation RiderCoaches.

“We’re able to give them that taste and then send them to their dealer for that next step,” she said.

Market Outlook

Competitive Analytics Takes a Look Ahead

With interest rates high, employment up, inflation cooling, and the stock market down, what’s ahead for a bumpy economy? David Savlowitz, founder and CEO of Competitive Analytics, and Michael Ponton, the firm’s director of analytics, provided some insights at the last Disruptive Thinking session of the week.

“We’re predicting a kind of soft to moderate landing sometime in 3Q, 4Q of this year,” Savlowitz said. “Is there any recession? Probably. The odds of a recession, some form of a recession, is like 85 percent. But is it going to be a really hard one? We think not, right now.”

A number of economic data points, called drivers, that have long been used by Competitive Analytics, are telling Savlowitz that the U.S. and global economies are turning into some headwinds.

Savlowitz said that before AIMExpo, his firm looked at 10 prominent, publicly traded recreational vehicle companies – which depend on outdoor-loving, adventurous customers just like the powersports industry does. The data trends, he said, suggest these firms are headed for softer sales.

“As you know better than we do, from experience, COVID brought in an aberration of very robust sales,” he said. “What you see here is a downshift.”

The same prediction is true for motorcycle sales.

“We have our forecast…and this is just a return to normality,” Ponton said. “A lot of us saw that drop in sales growth. In aggregate numbers, we’re still huge. Actual unit sales were still really strong. It’s just that growth had to come down.”