flâneur

Founders: #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers

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Your family asks you to take over a failing factory in a remote part of France. This “family business” comes with a stack of unpaid bills, a small team of workers who haven’t been paid in months, and a banker refusing to extend any more credit. You cut every unprofitable product and go all in on making rubber tires. You have no experience and don’t know a single thing about rubber manufacturing. You have a genius insight that selling tires is a waste of time and instead you should create the conditions for your product’s success. You organize the entire company around this core loop: encourage more driving → which leads to more movement → more movement leads to more wear → more wear leads to more tire sales. A simple and beautiful organizing principle emerges: a tire company will prosper if people travel more, so let’s help them do that. You make promiscuous use of the press. You write columns advertising the joys of the new activity of driving. You draw the maps, create the routes, and build thousands of road signs across France. All for free. Why? Because better signage means longer trips, more driving, and more tires sold. You publish the Michelin Guide — a free travel book with

[00:00] A: The Michelin brothers have to be one of the best co founder teams that I've ever read about. So one brother made the product and the other brother sold the product. And they did their respective jobs better than anybody else in the world. Andre Michelin may be the greatest marketer of all time, and his brother Edward is one of the greatest industrialists of all time. In fact, Edward would give the following speech to his employees. Counseling says, little streams make big rivers. A single minute lost each hour adds up to eight in a day, 2400 minutes in a year. That's 40 hours per…

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