by Christian Bayley

www.olivestudio.com

This spring marks the official release of the Honda Fury. This is a custom chopper style production bike from Honda. The Campaign they built around the launch of this motorcycle was intense starting January 16^th and through mid march, but is still in play in the social media channels and picking up steam now that national television ads are starting to go into heavier rotation.

One thing I really like about using them as a case study is that aside from understanding how a lot of these digital pieces fit with together with the offline and event based elements, this product is a good observation of a larger company  understanding trends and culture of the digital generation, and reaching out to them in the channels this generation spends most of its time and in the ways they are most comfortable interacting with brands. Custom bike culture isn’t new but it gained a larger following over the past few years thanks to shows on television like Monster Garage and American Chopper.

The custom motorcycles built by manufactures such as West Coast Choppers, Falcon Motorcycles  and dozens of others can run up to $80,000+ but create envy when they pass by. Honda has managed to make a factory bike that captures this spirit . . .even if it waters it down for a more mainstream version of this trend. One of the press comments summed it up nicely by saying “it shows that someone really sat down and thought about the design and made the kind of bike that you know a factory could make but few factories ever dare to try to make”.

I would say the same thing about the campaign itself. Very well integrated here are a sampling of some of the pieces:

A series of Brand Activation events, launches, press releases, vip parties, and auto shows that you can read about and see video from over at Taste.

At length highly produced commercial footage:

A creative campaign featuring children unleashing the FURY

To take a look at the entire YouTube channel developed for the Honda Fury launch visit here

To see the Flickr channel developed for the FURY launch visit here

And finally visit the main site for the FURY here

The campaign was very well integrated across all the media channels. Honda could have taken it a little further in the social media channels, but overall very nice campaign approach. I think this will be looked back on as one of the success stories of 2009 certainly in its category if not beyond.