Harley Davidson Case Study

According to Campbell (1995), different industry has different critical success factor, it has huge impact on how successfully and effectively a company meet strategic goals or objective, on the other side, company should perform with critical success factor at the highest possible level in order to achieve their competitive advantage. On the other hand, core competencies is unique strength that helps the company to better differentiate its products and or achieve substantially lower costs than competitors and thus gain competitive advantages. Moreover, core competencies arise from two sources: resource and capabilities, and resource divided in to tangible and intangible resource. (Hill and Jones, 2011) As a result, critical success factor and core competencies are both help organisation gain its competitive advantage.

Harley’s brand could be one of the core competencies in its organisation; it is intangible resource of Harley, the recognition of Harley’s brand is famous in the whole world, and Harley top management team considers that their brand is the greatest asset. (Grant, 2012) A strong brand can expand companies’ advantages, customers’ personal identification is leading to specific brand relationship through attitudinal attachment, loyalty, and consumer’ active engagement. This relationship can be built via favourable association. (Spence and Essoussi, 2010) In Harley, its brand has strong relation with American culture and it could be traced back to the cowboy. Harley also represented a tradition of United State engineering and manufacturing, they give consumer deep impression that Harley was not selling motorcycle but selling the experience. (Grant, 2012) In addition, in order to convey Harley’s lifestyle and ensure to increase customer’s riding experience, they set up Harley Owners’ Group (HOG) in order to improve the communication with customers, its employees are encouraged to participate events in HOG activities.