You Meet the Nicest People On a Honda

Photo by Todd Halterman, MotoFotoStudio.com

Grey Advertising, at the time a major player in the U.S. ad game, came up with a campaign anchored by the catchy slogan, “You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda,” and it
was peopled by an unlikely array of “bikers” such as housewives, a parent and child, young couples and other “respectable” members of society.

Referred to as “the nicest people”-the fantastic depiction of these invented Honda 50 devotees struck a chord among those who would otherwise have recoiled in horror at the thought of buying, much less riding, a motorcycle.

Against all odds, this cornball bit of salesmanship…worked.

Mothers who once were sure to respond to their adolescent child’s plaintive keening for a motorcycle – any motorcycle – with a dismissive snort, suddenly found themselves closing out the argument with, “I’ll buy you one, if it’s a Honda.”

Feel free to blame the Honda 50 for becoming the ultimate “gateway motorcycle,” as ownership of one led thousands of otherwise sensible children to become my kind of Scooter Trash.

While you may meet the nicest people on a Honda, it takes a machine of considerable more displacement to bring out the Sausage Creature, but once that inner Mad Dog is released beside the wild centerline of the Lost Highway on two wheels, it’s so long to being a citizen…