There’s no more primeval form of transport than the motorbike. Their guttural growl, their sleek lines, their ability to turn suit-wearing accountants into leather jacket-donning James Deans. As motorbike devotees will testify, that’s a spell even the most expensive supercars can’t cast.
But motorbikes are also deeply illogical. Putting your fleshy, bony and very breakable body astride a nought-to-sixty-in-ohmygod machine feels less A to B and more A&E.
But that’s the inherent appeal of a motorbike: their fusion of beauty and beast which forces riders to tread the line between exhilarating freedom and limb-preserving responsibility. It’s this sense of excitement, of drama, that resonates most to motorbike enthusiasts.
We should know, we’ve got a few in our offices. And as lovers of bikes and branding, we mashed the two together to find out which motorbike brands are doing digital branding the best.
You can read the report here, but if you want a bit more detail as to how we scored each motorbike brand, read on.
But which motorbike brands are they?
We chose eighteen of the world’s most recognisable and respected bike brands, from BMW to BSA, Norton to Harley.
So long as they were relatively well-known, made retro-style naked bikes (i.e. bikes where the inside mechanics appear on the outside) and had a digital presence to measure, we threw them in the ring.
What did you measure them against?
We considered SEO, UX and social media. We audited their websites to rate the user experience, ran SEO diagnostics to see how well their websites were pulling in leads, and rated their social media game in terms of regularity of posts, channels used and community building.
All good stuff.
But we’re not just a digital agency, we’re a brand engagement agency. And to us, a brand is much more than its digital assets — it’s how well the brand connects emotionally with its audience at every touchpoint.
So, most of all, we judged our motorbike brands on their ability to make us really feel. To make us forget the safe logic of four wheels in favour of edge-of-the-saddle two. This was a mix of aesthetics, drama, style, poetry in motion — or, as we called it, the Fuck, I want one factor (aka FIWO factor) — and it was the biggest metric we scored the motorbike brands against.
So… which motorbike brand won?
Because we scored them against a series of metrics, we have a few category winners. But, of course, there can be only one true champion.
And you can find out who that is here.