Badge engineering is a marketing tool that we equate with modern retailers where a manufacturer makes identical products sold under different brand names – but it’s far from new. In fact in the Sixties the British motorcycle industry was the master of the concept with AMC as an example badging a range of models as AJS, Matchless and Norton to capitalise on brand loyalty. Roll on to the Eighties, when Britain was reduced to having virtually a sole manufacturer, and the Armstrong corporation decided to enter the motorcycle market. Although a successful automotive component manufacturer, Armstrong was new to the motorcycle market. In the early Eighties it diversified into the electronic microchip market and the motorcycle industry, a strange combination at the time.
In 1981 Armstrong acquired the Cotton and CCM businesses to form Armstrong Competition Motorcycles in the hope of leading a resurgence of the British motorcycle industry. By combining all the makes it acquired into one, it sold newly designed bikes under the Armstrong brand.
At the same time Canadian industrial giant Bombardier, the original developer and manufacturer of the Can-Am range of bikes, decided to exit the motorcycle business. Some swift work by
