Harley-Davidson: a brand worn as an identity, and the generation that wears it

Harley-Davidson has built motorcycles in Milwaukee since 1903, and for most of the last fifty years it has sold a way of life along with them. In 1983, during a hard period for the company, it founded the Harley Owners Group (HOG), a club run by the manufacturer that organises rides, rallies and local chapters around the world. In 1994 it applied to register the sound of its V-twin engine as a trademark, and withdrew the application in 2000 after other manufacturers opposed it. Some owners tattoo the logo on their arm, a degree of attachment few consumer brands have ever reached.

That identity also has a demographic. Harley’s core buyers have long been older American men, and the company has said for years that it needs younger and more varied riders. Its answers took two shapes. In 2019 it launched an electric motorcycle called LiveWire; in 2021 LiveWire became a separate brand, and in September 2022 it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange as LiveWire Group, with Harley-Davidson keeping a majority stake. In August 2024, after a social media campaign by the activist Robby Starbuck accused the company of being “woke”, Harley said it would end several diversity programmes and stop taking part in the Human Rights Campaign’s corporate equality index. Separately, Jochen Zeitz, chief executive since 2020, announced his retirement, and Artie Starrs took over in October 2025. The criticism from Starbuck has continued under the new leadership, so the story is still moving.

Power the customer wears

Among the ways a brand can hold power over its market, the method lists one it calls transform into identity: the asymmetry passes to the customer, who wears it. Harley is the textbook case. Riders carry the brand on a jacket and a fuel tank, and in a HOG chapter they meet other people who wear it the same way. It is the most defensible posture a brand can reach and the slowest to build, and Harley spent decades building it.

The core values behind it are familiar: the open road, a streak of rebellion, American manufacturing, brotherhood, a particular sound. They were extracted from real assets (the engine, the factory, the clubs) and they hold together well. Their weakness is that each one comes with a picture of the person who embodies it, and that picture took shape in the 1960s and 1970s.

When values have an age

A value set can tie a brand to the generation that adopted it. Values once embraced stay in customers’ heads as a reading lens, which is why a loyal base forgives a great deal. The same lens filters newcomers. A younger rider, a woman, or a city commuter who might want a motorcycle reads “brotherhood” and “the open road” as an invitation written for someone else, and the motivation that adoption depends on never forms.

The method’s answer is slow substitution: keep three or four values in play and replace one at a time, so the base reads the new value through the old ones. Harley’s two recent moves sit at opposite ends of that idea. LiveWire put the new values (electric, urban, technical) in a separate brand, which protects the core identity from the change and also keeps the core from absorbing anything it learns. The 2024 dispute showed the other risk: when a company moves to widen whom it addresses, part of the base that wears the brand may read the move as a change of identity, and that base reacts in public.

A door that has to open wider

Read through the premise, the first P, the question is who the brand is for and who it is not. A premise that repels is useful, since it does the selecting at the door for free. Harley’s difficulty is that the people its premise keeps out now include many of the customers it will need in twenty years. Changing who a premise welcomes, while keeping the people already inside, is one of the hardest jobs in brand strategy. From outside we can see the tension, and we cannot see which trade-offs the company is weighing.

If your brand’s values were shaped by the customers who adopted them first, train your team to read which of those values open the door to the next generation and which ones keep it shut.