My top 10 highlights from the episode: (watch on Spotify)

1.  Slowness is the special defect of large companies and a cause of their ruin.

2.  You must create the conditions for your product’s success. They converged everything around their core loop: encourage more driving → which leads to more movement → more movement leads to more wear → more wear leads to more tire sales. A tire company will prosper if people travel more. We're not going to sell tires. We're going to sell movement.

3.  Anything that could get more people to join the automobile age was good for Michelin. The Michelin guide provided them with compelling reasons to try out their cars and wear out their tires, such as a good restaurant for lunch, a pleasant hotel in the evening. Later, the restaurant or the hotel could become the reason for the journey, and Michelin stars spelled that out. The initial Michelin star system: a single star called attention to "A good table in its community", two stars to an "Excellent table; worth a detour", three to "One of the best tables in France; worth the trip".

4.  In an era when many rubber companies dabbled in all kinds of products, the Michelins bet the future on one thing: tires. The brothers instilled a culture of “everything for the tire, and tires for everything.”

5.  Little streams make big rivers. A single minute lost each hour adds up to eight in a day, 2400 minutes in a year - or 40 hours per worker. If a factory employs 20,000 workers and each loses that minute per hour, that is 800,000 hours in a year - the equivalent of 333 years of work.

6.  The more difficult the problem, the less chance there is of being followed, the more fruitful the triumph will be. 

7.  Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate all efforts on horse-drawn carriages which offer a practically unlimited customer base? No. The car with tires will replace the horse. It is not with the last progress that one should proceed, nor even with today’s progress, but with that of tomorrow.

8.  They built road signs across France. Thousands of them, all for free. Why? Because better signs meant longer trips, more driving, more wear, and more tires sold. Every sign had an ad that said: “Gift of Michelin.”

9.  Michelin tires are presumably good tires, but one is apt to assume it because the Michelin maps and guides are so good, not the other way round.

10.  For the Michelin empire the obsession remains the tire. Nothing but the tire. And not just any tire, the best at the best price. For nearly a century now, Europe’s most secretive company has set its rhythm, calibrated its clock, and adjusted its ambitions according to this passion that borders on mysticism, and this burning, uncompromising, exclusive obsession.

Listen to #393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the Web.