Abstract

Motorcycling (biking) offers mobility to millions of Indians and is therefore an integral part of Indian culture and society. The social reality of biking in India is influenced by emotional needs of owning, purchasing and riding a motorbike. This paper focuses on investigating the user’s emotional needs associated with riding a motorbike in India. The paper establishes an emotional differentiation in the bikers’ needs within the social culture of biking in India -Bread and butter biking, Travel and comfort biking, Social networking biking, Dexterous and exploratory biking, High esteem biking and Religious biking (Das and Singh, 2008). The findings are based on an extensive study conducted among 3106 owners of 22 different motorbike models from various states in India. More than 10,000 qualitative comments of the respondents were analysed and assigned to 33 distinct categories using content analysis techniques (Krippendorf, 2004). It was found that the ‘Emotive Biking Experience’ is the most important need associated with biking in India, followed by ‘Comfort’, ‘Economy’, and ‘Fuel Efficiency’. The data was studied further to analyze the dominant emotional needs associated with each biking segment. Also, the quality and intensity of ‘Emotive Biking Experience’ associated with each biking segment was studied on the basis of Desmet’s (2002) circumplex of product emotions. The findings establish that the various biking segments can not only be differentiated on the basis of the emotional needs of biking but also on the quality and intensity of emotions associated with key emotional needs. And just like the spirit of India, which is known for unity in diversity, the diverse emotional experiences associated with bikers are also connected together with a single unified emotion of ‘Love’. This emotion signifies the most popular emotional state of bikers in India for their bikes. With more than 55% of statements, describing the emotive experiences falling in this category it would not be wrong to say that the phrase, “I love riding!” truly describes the emotions of millions of users in India.