It was a genius marketing strategy for the time.
How do we make people buy more tires? Motivate them to drive to interesting destinations out of town.
When they initially created the Michelin guide (more a booklet), they gave it away for free to garages, automotive shops, and filling stations as promotional material. Unnfortunately because it was free, the employees were using it to prop up things, just left them laying around and generally didn’t use it as a promotional device. Once Michenlin started charging for the guide, drivers started looking more closely and started using the guides increasely for trips
Well it makes sense if you think of it as a guide of "places worth driving to "
And that’s the idea actually. The Guide Michelin was really kind of a guide “what to do with a car” (in 1900 that was a question: now I got this modern thingie, but what can I do with it?). One possibility is to go to a restaurant, of which there are three categories (1 to 3 stars): worth a stop, worth a detour, worth a journey.
Same goes for Guinness world records. Any more examples?
When Anheuser-Busch was sold to InBev, InBev chose not to buy all of it.
InBev chose to sell off all the theme parks that a beer company owned for some reason.
InBev was forced to sell off the railroad car maintenance division as it was one of America’s largest and was considered a strategic company.
he would apparently do anything to sell more tires. We’re talking about the guy who organised a bike race and sabotaged it to promote his tires 🤷
le 5 juin 1892 la firme organise elle-même une autre course cycliste, Paris - Clermont-Ferrand, sur le trajet de laquelle Édouard Michelin fait semer des clous sans que les concurrents le sachent, afin de démontrer que la réparation du « Démontable » est désormais une opération de routine prenant moins de deux minutes. Le chiffre d’affaires explose et la même année, les pneus Michelin sont distribués pour la première fois à l’étranger, en l’occurrence par l’accessoiriste Boyriven, et rencontrent un succès commercial.
Their original moto and focus was about how fun drink driving is, the restaurant guide is to convince you to go on a daytrip
