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The Michelin Man was a content marketing pioneer. Image c/o Michelin.com.
This time of year, food is on everyone’s minds. By now we’ve pulled out grandma’s famous stuffing recipe (or scoured the Internet for our own better alternative), done our grocery shopping, and finalized our list of Thanksgiving guests or RSVP’d to a dinner we plan on attending.
And since both food and content marketing are on my mind, I’d like to share the story of Michelin, famous the world over first for their tires and secondly for their competitive, elite restaurant and hotel rating system and guide book, the Michelin Red Guide. You may not know it from their tire ads featuring the lovable marshmallow-puff Michelin Man, but Michelin was one of the original content marketing pioneers, and there’s much we can learn from their innovative ideas born over a century ago.
In 1895 brothers André and Éduard Michelin presented a new design for a state-of-the-art air-filled tire to the French market. Unfortunately, at that time, automobiles were a novelty, not many owned them, and those who did weren’t going on long road trips often because driving on primitive roads wasn’t very safe. The brothers had the brilliant idea to create a guide book of hotels and restaurants all over France that would motivate people to get in their cars—running on high-quality, safer Michelin tires—and experience the gastronomic pleasures and hospitality of provincial regions.
According to John Colapinto of The New Yorker, not only did the first edition of the Michelin Red Guide, published in 1900, feature “575 pages of alphabetical listings of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel,” it included instructions on how to replace a flat. That, my friends, was a brilliant way to educate and enlighten customers with free content, build credibility, and at the same time gently push a product. (Free copies were distributed from 1900-1920, until the brothers discovered that a pile of guides were being used as a jury-rigged workbench leg and decided to charge money for them.)
The sequential three-star Michelin rating system for restaurant quality, and other symbols for price, dining views, wine, etc., has become a world-renowned brand in its own right and a symbol for unparalleled restaurant reviews. It’s also come under much scrutiny in recent times. Critics say the organization is too obscure with its rating criteria and that reviewers have allegiances to some restaurants, giving them undeserved stars and other deserving restaurants no stars.
For now, though, Michelin is an industry leader in both tire manufacturing and restaurant rating thanks to the innovation—both in engineering and content marketing—of its founders so many decades ago. And while the French may eschew traditional American fare—turkey, stuffing, and cornbread make many a Frenchman turn his cheek in disgust—they certainly paved the way for content marketing today.
Tags: carolyn mckibbin, content creation, content marketing, creating content
