PowerSports Business

Powersports Business - May 25, 2015

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of the many components that led to the incred- ibly successful launch of the Spark. You mentioned Deadmau5. What were some of the reasons behind choosing Deadmau5 to be apart of the campaign? Did you feel he would connect to your consumers? With Deadmau5 that was the Miami Takeover with Deadmau5, and not just LOOK Marketing produced that. It was actually led by Sea-Doo's lead strategic agency, which is Cramer-Krasselt, out of Milwaukee, but we partnered on that. Basically, the goal was to get the Sea-Doo name and the Spark in front of a new generation of consumers. The average age of a typical water- craft owner is 48 years old. Part of the reason that Spark was introduced was there was no product that the next generation of boaters could access. And when I say access I mean access from a financial standpoint, access from a storage standpoint and access through not having to buy a new tow vehicle. By having everything in place and having the right prod- uct, they can add it to their life now without having to make other changes. We are going after a younger audience, the young professional or the people that have a young family that always dreamed of having a watercraft but for whatever reason they could never own one. We're knocking down those barriers, but the whole Deadmau5 initiative was to really get the product in front of a new audience and from the dealer's standpoint. That was one element that we did in the south Florida market that we leveraged digitally. The whole campaign in general worked because we've gotten a lot of feedback that dealers are seeing customers coming into their stores that they haven't seen or that they haven't seen in a long time, and they're coming in and asking for Spark. And that is really a big goal: To get new people going to the dealerships. The campaign definitely got people talking about the Sea-Doo Spark. Do you think this next summer will be as successful at drawing new customers as last year? The second year is going to be more — it's going to fit what our original plan was. The reason why is that in our first year a lot of cur- rent owners and a lot of enthusiasts purchased Spark because they had been waiting for some- thing small, lightweight and affordable. They added to their existing fleet or they replaced an older watercraft. Because it was in the early season a lot of the enthusiasts bought the Spark that weren't exactly the main target and some of the sales were a little bit skewed in the first year. In the summer we really started doing the promotion for the new customers. They came, but a lot of the Sparks were already sold out. So this year's going to be a much more accurate, a more telling story as far as if we're really hitting exactly what our target was. Speaking of this year, what are you most excited about? We're really looking to extend the launch of the Spark. Last year was the first year but there are still a lot of people that haven't heard about it. Or maybe last year they weren't in a position to think about it, and this year they are. So we've extended the launch. We also manage all the social media and all the PR efforts for Sea-Doo, so what we've developed is kind of a second- wave of #SPARKSOMEFUN. We've partnered with Devin Super Tramp; he's a very popular YouTube filmmaker. He does a lot of really fun adventure-type videos, and we partnered with him last year to do a wake skate video. Over the last five weeks we've been doing a #SPARKSOMEFUN sweepstakes, where we've been asking people to show us how they spark some fun. We're going to pick our five favorites and then the fans are going to vote for their favorite of the five. The winner, along with two guests, is going to win the Ultimate Sea-Doo Beach Party, which we are going to produce down in south Florida at the end of May. We're bringing some of our X-TEAM racers and our X-TEAM wake skaters, and we're going to have a Sea-Doo beach party just for them, and Devin Super Tramp is going to video the entire thing. It was a huge social media campaign to reach people that are into watersports — they've had the dream of owning a watercraft, but they weren't aware how accessible it is now with the Spark. It's a continuation of the launch, and we want to keep going after that new person to grow the industry. Working with Deadmau5 brought us a new audience, and we're also working with other influencers. Devin Super Tramp is an influencer; on average his videos get 2 million views. So we're working with different types of influencers on a social platform to get the world out about Spark. What goals do you have for the rest of 2015? We're just continuing our efforts, and luckily for us we're growing. You talked a little bit about staff, but we're actually growing with our clients, too. We just signed an agreement to begin working with BMW motorcycles on a retail merchandising program; that's the other side of our business where we help design strategic in-store merchandising programs, so we're going to start working with BMW. We also recently started working with Scarab jet boats and Rec Boat Holdings, which is a kind of a logical client for us because we were managing the Sea-Doo boat brand for so many years before that ended, and Scarab's kind of picked up where Sea-Doo's left off [with jet boats]. So we have a lot of jet boat expertise, and now we get to use that again. It's fun to be in the boat side along with watercraft, and it's also fun to be working with a premium brand like BMW motorcycles as well. And all of that is from various, yet diverse work that we've done with BRP. PSB McKERCHER CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15 www.PowersportsBusiness.com INDUSTRY LEADERS Powersports Business • May 25, 2015 • 21 INDUSTRY LEADER — TIM McKERCHER

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