Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France - Book Review

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2003 by Ellen Furlough

By Stephen L. Harp (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiii plus 356 pp. $42.00).

The title of Stephen Harp's highly intelligent and engaging book connotes more than one might initially suspect. On the one hand, Marketing Michelin is a focused effort to sort out the business history of how Michelin, a conservative and family owned French tire business, used direct marketing strategies to sell and create demand for its high quality tires. Yet, Marketing Michelin also addresses the firm's successful indirect marketing strategies, demonstrating how it associated the Michelin name with tourism, patriotism, pronatalism and paternalism, aviation, "Americanization", and regional gastronomy in early twentieth-century France. Harp's emphasis on marketing provides important new perspectives on Michelin's business success prior to 1940. It also demonstrates how a traditional and politically conservative family-owned firm helped forge key aspects of twentieth century French culture and national identity.

Harp's analysis begins in 1898 when Michelin introduced Bibendum, its company icon. At that time the firm was a leader in the production of pneumatic bicycle tires. By 1900 Michelin achieved dominance in the French market for automobile tires, and on the eve of World War I Michelin supplied approximately a third of the world's tires. While bicycles were becoming mass-market goods, automobiles remained elite commodities. Michelin thus had a vested interest in encouraging automobile travel as a way to sell tires, and in educating new consumers as to its uses and capabilities. Bibendum, Harp argues, helped to do both. Appearing in posters and the press as a well to do Frenchman who embodied contemporary assumptions about class and racial privileges and appropriate activities (such as automobile travel and tourism), Bibendum also dispersed advice on technical matters pertaining to autos and tires.

After the war, Michelin worked hard to maintain its market share against the robust efforts of American tire manufacturers. One strategy was to link the firm's name with French patriotism and the national interest. Fusing automobile tourism with patriotism, Michelin issued guides to the battlefields of the Western Front that emphasized the war's defensive nature in patriotic language. Michelin donated the profits from the battlefield guidebooks to France's major pronatalist organization, the Alliance Nationale, at the same time that it provided paternalistic family-oriented policies for its workforce. Harp claims that Michelin's pronatalism and its well-publicized system of family allowances for its workers contributed to the later political consensus that supported the modern French welfare state. Both the battlefield guidebooks and its pronatalist efforts enhanced the firm's self promotion as a patriotic firm selling French tires.

Harp breaks new ground with his superb research and analysis of Michelin's key role in the early development of the French tourist industry. He demonstrates Michelin's key role in fueling demand for automobile travel as a pleasurable way to discover France and generate economic growth. The company provided "service to the client" with tourist offices that arranged itineraries, and with what has become perhaps its most enduring form of indirect advertising: the Michelin Guide, or Guide Rouge (the first appeared in 1900). Michelin also helped shape and modernize France's tourist infrastructure by providing signs and road markers as well as maps oriented toward automobile travel. Michelin fused tourism, regionalism, and gastronomy during the interwar period by reinventing its Red Guides and launching regional guidebooks. Both guides reflected the growing touristic interest in the regions of France and their "authentic" cuisines and helped shape France's tourist-oriented landscape. The Michelin Guide's system of stars, in place and refined by 1933, ranked the "best" restaurants in places touted as tourist sites. This proved to be a brilliant marketing device as it not only put the Michelin name in front of the French (and foreign) public, but also promoted French regional sites and cuisines as tourist destinations. Harp provides a nuanced understanding of how modern travel, in cars sporting Michelin tires, not only became a patriotic way to savor excellent French cuisine and experience the purported "timeless essence of provincial France," but transformed both in the process.

Other chapters analyze Michelin's promotion of French aviation and of American forms of production in the interwar years. In both instances Michelin sought to identify the company name with modernity, patriotism, and the national interest. Michelin sponsored aviation prizes and lobbied the French government for the expansion of military aviation. Believing that military security depended upon a modernized and industrially competitive France, Michelin selectively embraced aspects of American mass production techniques, notably scientific management and Fordism. Michelin increased the pace of production, subsidized its workers' housing, paid relatively high salaries, and agitated for a mass market for automobiles. The lack of financial resources during the Depression, however, postponed the growth of a mass market for automobiles until after World War II. Still, Michelin's heavy investment in research and development laid the foundations for the postwar development of the both the popular Deux Chevaux (or 2CV) and the steel belted radial tire. The latter product would prove to be the firm's economic salvation in the postwar period. Harp concludes that in the final analysis that "Michelin did not want to 'Americanize' France so much as it wanted to modernize French industry, to promote techniques of production and mass consumerism for the sake of France, and, indirectly, for the sake of Michelin" (p. 190).