Ducati’s The Getaway: Here’s to the new generation of bikers

by DAVID BOOTH, MARCH 26, 2018 Full Story

The kids are returning to motorcycling’s roots, singing a song of stylistic simplicity and Spartan performance — and it’s a refrain Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali knows well

It’s a page right out of BMW’s social media playbook. Take one cool car – oops, bike – add a couple of semi-famous actors/actresses, create some tension, throw in a few plot twists, load it up on YouTube and consider your Bimmer – oops, Ducati – socially marketed.

As with BMW’s now famous mini-films, Ducati’s The Getaway is a familiar story. Gorgeous guy — David Hardcastle, stuntman extraordinaire — rides a cool car — oops bike. Hot chick — Imogen Lehtonen, also known as Imogenocide, jeweller, model and sometimes actress whose credits include AMC’s Ride with Norman Reedus — admires said cool car — oops … (Enough, Dave. We get it’s a bike already – Ed.), and then eludes guy. Guy then jumps on cool bike, and — well, what do you expect considering it’s a guy, a girl and a cool bike — chases girl. Oh, The Getaway, being thoroughly #MeToo modern, does have said girl borrowing guy’s bike for a moment and robbing a bank with it, but essentially, it’s still the same old story of guy, hot girl and cool car. Oops, bike.

This is what’s called “positioning” and is to Millennials, Gen Xers and hipsters what Bullitt, the Mustang GT 390 and Steve McQueen are to Boomers. Be it accidental — Bullitt/Mustang/Steve McQueen — or deliberate — pretty much everything about social media, no matter how supposedly unscripted — the end game remains the same – the creation of an icon so striking, so dramatic that the victim, once bitten, can never, ever shake their loyalty to that product. Ask any red-blooded gearhead between the ages of 45 and 65 what the best car chase scene ever filmed is and you can be pretty damned sure it’s going to be Bullitt. The Mustang has been pretty much living off the notoriety ever since.

That is what Ducati is after with its Scrambler, now that the whole custom/chopper/1950s bob job fixation is dead. Or, more specifically, is dying as its Boomer adherents pass their sell-by date. The kids are in charge and big Milwaukee twins don’t seem to interest them Indeed, they don’t want anything to do with our — as in me, the aging Boomer writing this — bikes. Where Boomers have done to bikes what they’ve done to cars — i.e., turn them into gaudy tributes to excess — the kids are returning to motorcycling’s roots, the song they sing being stylistic simplicity and Spartan performance.

It’s a refrain Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali knows well.

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