Most businesses are taught the same sequence : Create a product -> Find the people who might want it -> Advertise it -> Explain why it is better than the alternatives -> Persuade people to buy.
It seems logical because it places the product at the centre of the business and then asks marketing to create enough attention around it to generate demand.
But some of the most interesting businesses in history have approached the problem from almost the opposite direction.
Instead of asking, “How do we convince more people to buy what we sell?”, they have asked a much more powerful question:
“What would need to happen in the world for more people to naturally need what we sell?”
That sounds like a subtle distinction, but it can completely change the way a business thinks.
More than a century ago, two French brothers understood it remarkably well.
And they sold tyres.
In 1900, André and Édouard Michelin faced a problem that would be familiar to almost any entrepreneur trying to build a market around something relatively new.
They manufactured tires, but France was still at the beginning of the automobile age. Cars were expensive, roads were inconsistent and long-distance motoring was nothing like the effortless activity it would eventually become.
Michelin could have concentrated entirely on advertising tires. It could have produced increasingly persuasive messages explaining why Michelin tyres were stronger, safer or better engineered than those of its competitors.
Instead, the brothers looked beyond the tire itself.
If they wanted motorists to use more tires, people needed to drive more. And if they wanted people to drive more, driving needed to become easier, more useful and more enjoyable. That led to an extraordinary piece of marketing that, more than a century later, most people no longer think of as marketing at all.
Enter … The Michelin Guide.
The first edition appeared in 1900 and was distributed free to motorists. It contained practical information designed to make travelling by car easier, including maps and information about accommodation, places to eat and other things motorists might need while travelling.
Michelin wasn’t simply telling people to buy more tires. It was helping give them reasons to use the tires they already had.
And therein lies the much bigger business lesson :
"Michelin didn't simply create demand for its product. It helped create demand for the activity that consumed it."
The genius of the Michelin Guide was not simply that it was free.
Businesses give things away all the time, often without accomplishing very much.
What mattered was what Michelin chose to give away.
The guide reduced some of the friction surrounding early motoring. It helped answer the practical questions that could discourage someone from travelling: Where do I go? Where can I stay? Where can I eat? What will I find when I get there?
Every answer made travelling a little easier.
And every additional journey meant more kilometres on the road.
More kilometres meant more tyre wear.
More tyre wear eventually meant more tyres.
Michelin had found a way to market its product without making the product the centre of the marketing.
Instead of continually asking customers to consume more, it helped create a world in which greater consumption became a natural consequence of something customers actually wanted to do.
That is a very different way of thinking about demand.
Businesses understandably spend enormous amounts of time thinking about their products :
- How can we improve it?
- How can we make it cheaper?
- How should we package it?
- What should the advertisement say?
- What feature will make somebody choose us rather than a competitor?
All of those questions matter, but they can also trap a business inside the boundaries of what it already sells.
Michelin’s insight was to look one step further out.
The company didn’t merely ask how to make a better tyre. It also helped make the world around the tyre more useful.
This opens up a different set of questions :
- What makes people hesitant to use your product?
- What makes the activity surrounding it difficult?
- What information are customers missing?
- What would make them more confident?
- What could you teach, provide or create that makes the entire category easier to enter?
Sometimes the greatest opportunity isn’t hidden inside the product at all. It is sitting somewhere immediately outside it.
There is another reason the Michelin story matters.
The company created something genuinely useful before asking for another sale.
That is easy to overlook because modern marketing has become so obsessed with immediate conversion that almost everything is measured by how quickly it moves someone toward a purchase.
Click the advertisement.
Enter the funnel.
Join the mailing list.
Buy now.
The problem is that customers know when every interaction is simply another disguised attempt to sell them something.
Giving first changes that relationship.
A useful guide, a genuinely helpful tool, valuable information, education, entertainment or an experience that improves someone’s life can create something advertising alone struggles to manufacture:
trust.
People begin associating the business with usefulness before they associate it with a transaction.
That doesn’t mean generosity automatically becomes a business model, nor does it mean companies should give away everything they create and hope money eventually appears.
Michelin itself began charging for the Guide in 1920.
The more useful lesson is that giving something away can be extraordinarily powerful when what you give away expands the environment in which your paid product becomes valuable.
You can see variations of this idea in modern businesses as well.
Consider Red Bull.
It would have been possible to market an energy drink almost entirely around ingredients, taste, price and the temporary effect people expected from drinking it.
Instead, Red Bull spent decades building a much larger world around the product: extreme sports, athletes, racing, adventure, music, spectacular events and increasingly ambitious feats that people wanted to watch regardless of whether they happened to be thinking about buying a drink at that moment.
The product existed inside a culture. This distinction matters.
A traditional advertisement interrupts something you already wanted to watch and asks for your attention.
But a business that creates something people genuinely want to experience doesn’t always have to interrupt the audience. Sometimes the audience comes looking for it.
The company is no longer merely advertising a product. It is helping shape the world in which that product makes sense.
There is a deeper principle underneath all of this.
Most marketing is built around Persuasion. It begins with an existing situation and asks how we can convince someone to behave differently inside it.
But another form of marketing is built around Enablement. Instead of asking how to persuade people to do something, it asks what currently prevents them from doing it and whether that obstacle can be removed.
That distinction can produce very different ideas.
If people are intimidated by investing, perhaps the opportunity isn’t another advertisement for an investment platform but better education that makes investing understandable.
If customers find a technology confusing, perhaps the greatest marketing investment is not another campaign explaining how advanced it is but a tool that makes the technology effortless to use.
If people aren’t buying something because they don’t understand why they need it, perhaps shouting the product’s features more loudly isn’t the answer. Maybe the real opportunity is helping them understand the problem first.
This is what makes the Michelin example so enduring.
The brothers weren’t merely promoting tires. They were helping enable motoring.
There is an understandable obsession in business with attribution.
- If we spend a dollar here, how many dollars come back?
- Which advertisement produced the sale?
- Which email generated the click?
- Which campaign converted the customer?
Those questions are important, particularly for small businesses that cannot afford to spend money indefinitely without understanding whether it is working.
But this obsession with immediate measurement can also discourage businesses from creating things whose value compounds slowly.
- A useful article might be continually discovered for years.]
- A free tool might introduce thousands of people to a company.
- An educational video may answer someone’s question months before they become a customer.
A community can create relationships that no advertisement could purchase.
And a little red guidebook created to help motorists travel around France can eventually become one of the world’s most recognised authorities on restaurants.
The irony is that the Michelin Guide became vastly more culturally famous than the marketing purpose from which it emerged.
That is what can happen when a business creates something valuable enough to develop a life of its own.
There is a related idea in the story of Charles Dow, and how he began distributing financial news to Wall Street customers in the 1880s, eventually publishing The Wall Street Journal. His Dow’s stock averages also provided a way of representing movements in parts of the market through a comprehensible number.
Dow was not simply “giving away financial information” in the modern free-content sense. He recognized the value in making a complicated activity easier to navigate.
The important connection to Michelin isn’t that the business models were identical.
They weren’t.
Information itself can expand a market because people participate more confidently in things they understand.
This is why education, explanation and useful information can sometimes become more powerful business assets than promotion.
They reduce uncertainty.
And uncertainty is one of the greatest forms of friction.
There is a question almost every business asks: What else can we sell our customers?
It is a perfectly reasonable question.
But Michelin suggests another one that may occasionally be much more valuable: What could we give customers that would make the entire world around our product more useful?
That might be :
- knowledge.
- A calculator.
- A guide.
- A community.
- Entertainment.
- Research.
- An experience.
- A platform.
- A tool.
The answer will be different for every business, and sometimes there will be no sensible answer at all. Giving something away simply because ‘free content’ is supposed to build an audience can become another empty marketing formula.
The important part is the thinking behind it.
What obstacle stands between people and greater participation in the world your business serves?
If you can remove that obstacle, you may not need to push the product quite so hard. Demand may begin moving toward you.
The conventional business rulebook tells us that marketing begins with the thing we want to sell.
Build the product, explain the benefits, advertise it and persuade people to buy.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach, and millions of successful businesses have been built using it.
But it isn’t the only approach.
Sometimes the more interesting opportunity appears when you stop staring at the product and start examining the environment around it.
Michelin sold tires, but it helped make travel easier.
Red Bull sells drinks, but it built a cultural world around energy, adventure and performance.
The broader principle is not that every company should launch a magazine, sponsor someone jumping from the edge of space or start giving its products away. It is much simpler than that.
"Before asking how to sell more of what you make, ask what would need to change for more people to naturally want what you make."
That question shifts business thinking away from persuasion and toward possibility.
Instead of trying to force demand, you begin looking for the conditions that allow demand to grow.
And sometimes the smartest thing a business can give away isn’t a sample of its product. It is a reason to need the product in the first place.
The Michelin brothers could have followed the obvious rulebook and concentrated entirely on selling tyres. Instead, they looked beyond the product and asked what would make the world around their product bigger.
That same question can be applied far beyond business.
We often concentrate so intensely on achieving the outcome directly in front of us that we overlook the conditions that would make that outcome easier to reach. We push harder, advertise louder, work longer or try to become more persuasive when the better answer may be to change the environment surrounding the problem.
NoRuleBook explores those moments when the obvious route isn’t necessarily the only route, and when questioning the assumptions surrounding a problem can reveal opportunities that weren’t visible while we were simply following the conventional instructions.
The lesson isn’t to give everything away.
It is to think one step further out.
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