For many, video games might just seem like a good way to waste an hour. But you should take note, as video games are roughly a $100 billion industry worldwide.

With that much money on the line, the gaming industry has had to evolve much more rapidly than our two-wheeled world, with video game companies not only looking for the latest trends and technologies, but also needing to be keenly more aware of their consumers’ traits and desires.

Because of this, the video game industry has made some interesting progress on understanding its users, and catering to their wants and needs.

One of these frameworks has always struck me as being highly salient to the motorcycle industry (among others), and since I finally bought my first gaming console a few weeks ago, the idea has come back to me as something we should talk about here on Asphalt & Rubber.

The idea, first coined by Richard Bartle in 1996, is pretty simple, and it divides people along four fairly self-explanatory attributes: achievers, explorers, socializers, and destroyers.

In the gaming industry, you would be hard-pressed to find a title that wasn’t built around the Bartle Test, yet it is astounding to me that the motorcycle industry has been so slow to latch onto this concept, as we have seen “gamification” permeate into other business sectors over the past decade.

To be fair, the application of gamification in other industries is very one-dimensional and tends to lean on only the achiever attribute. For the motorcycle industry, however, Bartle’s four-axis approach fits surprisingly well.

The Four Types of Motorcyclists You Meet in Heaven

If you have ever met a motorcyclist that needed to have every farkle possible on their motorcycle, you likely have met someone who scores highly as an achiever.

Iron Butt winners and long-distance tourers score well on the explorer index. And the stereotypes we have about certain brand owners, congregating at the local Starbucks? You guessed it: socializers. But what about the “destroyers” amongst us?

The most obvious answer is the “1%” movement we have in motorcycling, where the biker gang lifestyle runs rife and sullies motorcycling’s good name. But, we can broaden that definition to include any individual that enjoys to a certain extent being a contrarian.

If we get really honest about things, every motorcyclist likely has some “destroyer” in them, since we all set ourselves apart from the mainstream with the simple choice of being motorcyclists.

That leads us to perhaps the most important takeaway here: that each person isn’t just one of these four elements, but instead we are all four elements to varying degrees.

Taking It Personally

So why does this all matter? Well in western culture, motorcycles are highly personal purchases, and being a motorcyclist is a highly personal character trait.

It is for this reason that we see so much infighting in the motorcycle community, simply because we see people who “motorcycle differently than we do” and we take that difference as some sort of personal affront.

For some reason we think that if someone dresses up in black leather chaps, and riders a Harley-Davidson with ape-hanger bars, then that somehow affects how we ride our sport bikes on race tracks, covered head-to-toe in Power Ranger gear – and vice versa.

For the same reason that Harley riders don’t wave to sport bikes (and no one waves to scooter riders), it is important to under stand psychological and sociological factors that come part and parcel with owning a motorcycle.

Because motorcycling is such a powerful personal distinction for motorcyclists, tapping into that psychological need and feeding its hunger is an immensely powerful tool, and this is where Bartle’s four attributes become so keenly powerful for motorcycle brands.

In Application

We already see savvy motorcycle brands applying this concept, at least in part.

BMW, Ducati, and Harley-Davidson cater to socializers with their owner groups, giving motorcyclists of a particular brand a community of peers.

Harley-Davidson’s effort is perhaps the most notable for this, as it has created an insulating barrier protecting it from other brands, who may be offering the same kind of product, but are offering membership to the wrong kind of club. I’m talking to you, metric cruisers.

For achievers, the concept is less obvious sometimes, but you can see it in the way that brands offer their motorcycles at different trim levels. It has always surprised me that more savvy brands haven’t applied this notion to their parts catalog though.

When it comes to explorers, we see less action here from the OEMs than we do from groups and organizations. One could argue that the explorer attribute is what is fueling the rise of the adventure-touring movement in the motorcycle industry, with other Ewan & Charleys around the world looking for their own long way round.

The most difficult attribute to understand though is the destroyer. This is because some people just want to swim upstream (or watch the world burn, as The Dark Night warned us), and part of understanding destroyers is understanding when that is the case.

On a more productive level though, the destroyer trait manifests itself beyond just anti-social behavior, with some in the gaming world suggesting that many destroyers can more accurately be described as hackers.

Things take on a more Schumpeter purpose here then, as the goal then isn’t how to destroy something, but instead how to make it their own or change it into something new.

In motorcycles, this idea manifests itself as the rise of tuners, builders, and even racers. Should it surprise anyone that the outsider hipster demographic in motorcycling rejects much of modern motorcycling, while it conversely latches onto ideas from the larger Makers Movement?

As the motorcycle industry evolves even further, this will mean something different for a new generation of riders, and quite literally could mean creating digital systems for hackers to dive into, for their own purposes.

We are beginning to see such ideas come forth with the rise of electric motorcycles, which are finding more traction from a tech community that is already comfortable with the idea of something like an API or SDK.

Being l337

As we have shown, smart brands are already doing some things that fit Bartle’s framework, and this isn’t because there’s an Xbox in the break room, but instead because some of the ideas are already basic good business.

Smarter brands though will see where their gaps exist along these four attributes, and that their own current efforts are only touching the very basic elements of these ideas.

There isn’t a brand in the industry that has savvy operations along all four attributes, though we do see some standouts on particular axes. The OEM, or even the startup, that ups their game to the next level will see bigger rewards of their efforts.

This means not only stronger sales, but also stronger brand interactions and deeper value added experiences – all of which means more money.

That’s as close as I will get to some sort of “high score” analogy to wrap-up to this post with… so, you’re welcome.