Harley-Davidson to show earnings for Q1, but continues its epic slide | What went wrong with this brand?

Even though Harley's freefall as a company continues, it looks like they will actually post earnings for Q1 according to THIS STORY from Yahoo! Finance. That wasn't expected and buys them a little more time in the wake of having recently stopped a partial takeover. Here's hoping they figure out a way to turn things around, but according to the current numbers, it's gonna take more than their few remaining loyalists to save this dinosaur from extinction. That said, Harley has proven itself to have 9 lives in decades past. Let's just hope they're only on No. 8 because America wouldn't be the same without them.

As a motorcyclist of some 42 years now, I've never had any serious interest in owning a Harley-Davidson (though I did entertain the thought building a Hammer Sportster several years ago). However, I do think it is an important American brand and that losing it would have a huge negative affect on the American psyche. It would be the equivalent of losing Chevy or Ford or the Dallas Cowboys. It would not be good.

So what went wrong with Harley? Volumes have been written on this subject already. Sure, the global motorcycle market as a whole is in the shitter right now, but Harley is the only major manufacturer in real danger of folding at the moment. The most important dynamic is probably that they have been rejected by millennials and Gen-Z as relevant. There are a lot of reason for that, from Harley's expensive pricing to a new cultural generation gap that is both wide and deep.

You can't really blame young people for not caring about H-D. Like many of the young people who have outrightly rejected the brand at this point, I've never understood the lure of Harley –– the "mystique", as it is sometimes called. Moreover, I've never understood brand loyalty at all. In fact, I learned to hate it in over 15 years as an advertising agency professional. Brand loyalty is one of the easiest scams in marketing, whereby companies manipulate consumers through their sense of morality. Harley has been doing it for years in an almost predatory way; $1,000 for a Chinese-made jacket, wildly overpriced (yet technologically inferior) bikes, in-house financing that's basically lone-sharking, astronomical labor rates, etc.

None of this is lost on millennials and Gen-Z. They consume 7,000 instances of marketing per day, and the Harley logo is just another piece of advertising clutter to them. They never saw Easy Rider and wouldn't even understand it if they did. They are savvy about being sold to and they don't fall for the same ballyhoo as previous generations. Harley hasn't figured that out.

I've made a big part of my living in the music industry over the past three decades, and to me, Harley is the washed up, egotistical rock star who walks into the nightclub expecting to be the center of attention, only to find itself being ignored by a bunch of young people who've never heard any of the old hits.

H-D better figure something out, and fast.