What’s in a name?
Branding can sometimes make or break a product, but it seems in the scooter world that if we just add speed, tuning, performance or development to the brand name it’ll be an instant success... or will it?
Speed, it seems it is all about the speed. We all know that tuning scooters to make them go faster has been an important part of the scootering world pretty much from day one. But I was thinking the other day just how many scooter dealers and businesses are something or other speed. You all know them: Rayspeed, Taffspeed, Chiselspeed, Readspeed, Madspeed, Robbospeed, Beedspeed, Jahspeed… the list continues.
There are defunct lines like the legendary Royspeed that are begging to be reborn, but it seems that over the years that word speed is such a common theme in our world. I’m sure there are more ‘something-speeds’ that I’ve missed. So whether it’s adding that word after your name, or your locality it somehow just seems to fit with scooters. I can’t imagine that the motorcycle world has lots of ‘bikespeeds’!
It seems that there are as many businesses with speed in their name as there are with scooters! What many of these dealers have in common is that they have often done great work and development over many years to push forward our world, to the point where we want our scooters ever faster and more powerful. Whether it be selling go-faster parts or actually taking the tools to parts and porting, grinding or cutting to make more power or even manufacturing things… it is all about the speed.
Of course, there are also lots of dealers with the more specific tuning tag… Performance Tuning, Taylor Tuning, JB Tuning, PM Tuning and the like. The common thing with all these businesses is that they all have a solid name in the history of scootering in terms of pushing things forward well beyond what the manufacturers had in mind. Whatever you want to do to make your scooter faster it’s the guys with these words in their name that are the most likely to help you.
Scooter owners must have spent literally millions on changing and improving their humble engines over the last 60 years or so, and if anything this type of activity is increasing as the machines age and wear out. It certainly seems very unlikely to be stopping anytime soon, and those dealers and businesses based on speed and tuning seem to have weathered the various economic storms well.
In recent years our European friends have joined the party, with developments coming from the Italian stable as well as Germany. The passion of scooters simply continues year after year. Talking to a friend this morning who is involved in developing electric and battery power, he could really see the market for vehicles with the classic styling of Vespa and Lambretta but utilising modern electric drive units. I can’t see that catching on in the real enthusiast’s world, but I certainly could in the world of commuting, with the ever increasing pressures on city streets and diminishing fuel resources. Perhaps in the future, we will be seeing the ‘Power’ brand names (BeedPower, ChiselPower etc.) catching on as electric powered vehicles become more common. Once electric cars really take hold surely it’s only a matter of time before electric two-wheeled vehicles follow suit. Perhaps emissions laws might even speed that process but a faint whirring of electric power will never replace the crackle and smell of our two-strokes.
So in the meantime, our scooters, speeds, tunings and developments are where it’s at. So if anyone is starting a new dealership or scooter business it appears you couldn’t go far wrong with one of those words dropped into your title!
Rayspeed, Taffspeed, Chiselspeed, Readspeed, Madspeed, Robbospeed, Beedspeed, Jahspeed… the list continues.