Harley-Davidson:
For the Long Haul

Featuring four vital measurement tips from Harley’s Director of Corporate Communications, Joe Hice.

Talk about benchmarking in the blood, Harley-Davidson has been tracking its media coverage since 1904! And it has been doing serious PR measurement for the past five years, beginning right about the time Joe Hice joined the company from Bombardier.

Joe, now Director of Corporate Communications, quickly realized that while the advertising department had its reach numbers, the sales department had its sales numbers, and Harley-Davidson University could report student success ratios tied to customer satisfaction, the only nebulous goal PR could report was “a warm glow.”

“You can’t fight the numbers game without the numbers,” he says, and so he embarked on a rigorous competitive measurement program that tracks mindshare in the thousands of articles that are written about motorcycles and related products every month.

Using Biz 360’s measurement tools, Hice tracks 22 different messages and topics, comparing Harley-Davidson’s performance to its competition on each one. While he can check results on an hourly basis if he wants to, he admits that one of the biggest challenges is deciding which numbers to track. He pays particular attention to the most prominent mentions and sets very specific goals for his departments. “We want 51% of the mindshare out there, and our goal is 2 billion media impressions for our 100th anniversary,” Hice declares. He shares his results with his own department via a monthly electronic newsletter that is also distributed to key management.

Hice even brings his agencies into the discussion, giving them a password to access the site where the data resides. His long-term goal is to analyze the data more fully and try to find correlations with sales. Unfortunately, since Harley has sold out of its entire product line every year for the last ten years, Hice admits that correlating to sales data may be difficult. (How many companies would like to have the same complaint?)

Among the tips he suggests for other companies that seek to implement programs like his:

1. Keep it simple: Don’t get too complicated or too overwhelmed with data. Focus on the numbers that really matter.
2. Just do it: Even if you just take your clips and divide them into boxes to track volume, start somewhere.
3. Monitor the competition: The only thing that really matters to management is where you stand vs. the competitors.
4. Be consistent: Whatever you decide to do, do the same thing consistently over time. Adjust the program as needed, but try to keep the data consistent.

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