#393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers
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 locations of hotels, restaurants, mechanics, and sites to see. You create the Michelin stars which become the global gold standard in fine dining and help people travel far for great food. You stimulate demand through spectacle. You sponsor races, airshows, and contests with cash prizes. You make smart bets early so by the time cars appear in large numbers you already own the roads. You create the most successful company mascot of all time and create a family dynasty that lasts 100 years.
You're not one person, but two. André and Édouard Michelin, two brothers and one of the greatest cofounder teams in history.
This episode is what I learned from reading Michelin: A Century of Secrets by Alain Germain and The Michelin Men: Driving an Empire by Herbert Lottman.
------
Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money.
-----
Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta. Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort. Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off.
-----
Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book
----
Founders
Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work. This quote explains why: "There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time." —Marc Andreessen
- No. of episodes: 412
- Latest episode: 2025-07-13
- Business History Entrepreneurship
Where can you listen?
