If you want to understand new developments in market mix modelling, study motorcycle history. One of the essential marketing case studies is the Honda Cub and its landmark ad campaign “You meet the nicest people on a Honda”. The key point is making an existing product so easy to use that it becomes open to a much larger audience than ever before.
The saying is that good advertising builds sales, great advertising builds factories. In 1956 Honda’s Takeo Fujisawa aimed to devastate the competition. He wanted to develop a product that was more reliable than gremlin prone British bikes and more accessible than the American Harley Davidsons. His vision was far beyond the domestic Japanese market, so he committed to a dramatic expansion of production capacity in one of the biggest corporate bets ever.
His business partner, Soichiro Honda, was the engineer, more interested in engines, racing and winning. To him, the smell of oil was perfume. Takeo’s vision of a small, reliable scooter that could be easily ridden with one hand was the antithesis of anything found on a racetrack. Nonetheless the two partners decided that their visionary design would take them from 3,000 bikes a month to 50,000. This, in a market considered saturated while Honda’s international sales and distribution had yet to be developed.
The key to the design was reliability and ease of use. Engineering details included putting the oily chain in a plastic housing to protect the rider’s pants, shifting gears didn’t need a clutch, “step though” frame kept the centre of gravity low and plastic protection from road debris. It had to a transportation appliance not a gearhead hobby.
The American public’s image of motorcycles was defined in 1953 by Marlon Brando in the film The Wild One. The film featured the 600cc Triumph Thunderbird. British bikes dominated the market in the 50’s and their makers were smug. They believed the Honda Cub wasn’t a real motorcycle and its riders would eventually want to graduate to larger highway and racing oriented products, even if the Norton’s, BSA’s and Triumph’s had dodgy electrics, were prone to unscheduled maintenance and required riders to be part-time mechanics.
By 1963, the Honda Cub was a success with production running at 1 million units a year, but even greater success was to come as Honda launched one of the definitive success stories in advertising. Who advertises motorcycles in Life magazine or on the Academy Awards ($300,000 a minute)? It was Kihachiro Kawashima who signed off on the media plan “doubting very much whether he would have made the decision if it had been his own money”. Not only did US sales take off, but redefined who rode motorcycles in the US. The Honda Super Cub is still sold globally in 2024 and studied at business schools as the case for creating markets.
Today’s parallel is market mix modelling becoming a marketing measurement appliance. Just as the Honda Cub hid all the messy mechanics and focused on ease of use, Arima has put all the Bayesian Regression math and data cleaning behind an interface. Instead of requiring operators to know Python or R, which Google Meridian and Meta’s Robyn do, Arima demands a skill set easily within the media planner’s capabilities. This opens the use of MMM to many more marketers, it’s cheaper, easier and more connected to the rest of a cloud-based platforms now in use by marketers.
Advertisers have long wanted a simple means to evaluate their cross-media efforts and connect outcomes into their cross-media planning. The example of how the Honda Cub’s targeted user design demonstrates proves that a redefinition of an old product can dramatically increase its use with new users.
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