Overview

This document explains what an insight is by using a Michelin example to illustrate its importance.

The key messages are:

• Michelin sought ways to attain superior understanding of the values attributed to tires by consumers (drivers).
• To create difference, Michelin focused on the driver’s larger domain as parent and family safety officer.
• The insight involved understanding the tire as an affirmation of the driver’s highest value—family safety and his role as a parent.

Business context

In the early 1980s, all competitive advertising in the tire category focused on technology. B.F. Goodrich used the tag line "We Make Cars Perform" in its 1984 ads, and Goodyear ads in publications for car enthusiasts ended with "Goodyear: Racing To Bring You The Best Tire In The World." The prevailing design in all these ads seemed to be a mixture of racing cars, prominently displayed tires and charts.
An early functional attribute for tires was the self-sealing tire which enabled drivers to make it to the next service station when one of their tires was punctured.
When “steel belted radial” technology arrived, marketers made the astounding promise of a “40,000 mile” guarantee to a public accustomed to tires lasting less than half as long. Numerically quantifiable promises of this type are notoriously easy to match; so competitors were soon back in the search for a value more meaningful than a few extra miles.
By the early 1990s, the tire industry had gone through a long evolution from selling primitive functional attributes to offering much more sophisticated benefits based on technological improvements.
This required marketers to begin looking at the driving experience to understand the relationship of car, driver, road and tire.

Search for insight - looking for values

Most tire companies started searching for a more compelling value, one with emotional value.
One search pointed towards the tire’s contribution to the driving experience and the freedom offered by the open road. Another led to handling the seductive power of driving on the edge, implicitly faster than your friends or rivals.
Another value that was continuously explored was safety, especially for those concerned about driving on slippery wet pavement. An early effort was Uniroyal’s “Tiger’s Paw”, a particularly memorable and well-positioned product that attributed the legendary agility and sure-footedness of the cat to the tires on the family auto.
Others showed visuals of water being channeled away from the tire, implicitly providing the driver with a drier, safer grip on wet roads. These demonstrations were often “paid off” by visuals of panic stops in bad weather to avoid a pedestrian or family pet.

The consumer insight

You need to enter the consumer’s domain to understand the upward progression of the hierarchy ladder from a simple product attribute (a tire that fits my car) to the consequences of that attribute, and finally to a deeply held value.
Let’s look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs framework (below) for an explanation of the insights on tires.

1. Low-level needs like ‘lasts longer’, better handling, etc. are price of entry.
2. High-level needs are almost always values.
3. Goal: identify highest level emotional need.

In Michelin’s case, entering the domain looking for insights allowed them to understand that the car and the act of driving was part of a larger experience called parenting and that this domain was driven by deeply held, powerful values one associates with “being a good father or mother” and with “protecting the children”.
Some factual data that helped guide Michelin to this insight was information like the number of trips and hours adults spent with children in the car. But only face-to-face interviewing and riding with parents during an ordinary day (ethnographic observations) led them to these insights:

• Drivers are also parents who spend a lot of time with children in the car.
• Parents want to protect their children by having a safe car.
• Tires are seen as one of the most important safety devices on the car.