Learn content marketing from the Michelin Guide: build credibility with professional evaluation and ritual
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After long calls, Michelin Guide Taipei Edition was finally announced on March 14th! A total of 20 restaurants in Taipei City have received stars (highly rated from one to three stars). Among them, [palaisdechinehotel.com/tw/restaurant-info.php?id=6] at Palais Dechine Hotel has won the highest honor of three stars. Here, “Content Hacker” would like to congratulate these high-quality restaurants for being recognized by international evaluation units.
After the results were announced at noon yesterday, sure enough, Facebook feeds were filled with friends reposting the list of Michelin-starred restaurants, and many friends were counting how many stars they had eaten in total. After the rush of media reports and reposts has passed, everyone will probably use search engines to query, or go to the Michelin Guide official website to check the list of these restaurants; it is conceivable that the Michelin keyword will definitely be popular for a while.
If you think that the Michelin Guide is just a food guide, you are really wrong! The “Michelin Guide” is actually “Corporate self-media in the field of content marketing” dia.html)”, from the beginning of 35,000 free guides in France, to now it has successfully established an authoritative image of food and travel, and it needs to be purchased globally (https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010780859) (available in online bookstores).
What is “corporate self-media”?
Owned media is media run by the company itself (non-mass media), which provides useful information to consumers in specific areas of the company’s business scope, similar to professional trade magazines on the market.
The starting point of corporate self-media is not direct sales, but to provide existing customers and potential customers with “interesting, informative, relevant and practical information”, but the ultimate goal is still to promote corporate products and concepts.
Corporate self-media is not the same as promotional catalogs. It will focus more on making the content have a long-term impact on readers and establishing a professional brand image in the minds of consumers, rather than short-term one-time exposure.
In fact, corporate self-media has a wide range of applications. It is not exactly the stereotype that companies use to publish information about their own activities. You might as well think about how the “Michelin Guide” (https://guide.michelin.com/tw/taipei), the founder of corporate self-media that started more than a hundred years ago, uses the travel and food guide to market Michelin tires in the industry?
As early as 1898, there were a pair of brothers Andre in France. Michelin (André Michelin) and Edward. Édouard Michelin founded the Michelin Tire Company. In 1900, in order to allow wealthy French people who could afford cars at the time to drive frequently to travel in search of delicious food and thereby consume more tires, the brothers had an idea and created the earliest corporate self-media, which is now the Michelin Guide. The guide tells drivers that there are delicious and fun places there that are worthy of consumers’ continued patronage, making the content a marketing tool.
Assuming that Michelin did not start from the perspective of content marketing, the Michelin Guide may become Michelin [Tire Catalog] (http://www.michelin.com.tw/TW/zh/tires.html), telling everyone that they can enjoy a 15% discount on high-speed tires before the end of the month. Then, the target audience will only pay attention to the price of the tire itself, and will not think that travel and food are the real purposes of driving.
Looking at the development of the Michelin Guide, what key points has been achieved in content marketing?
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The content is useful to the target audience: Provide car owners with delicious and fun places to visit, attracting the target audience to visit again. At the same time, it also indirectly achieves the purpose of promoting tire consumption.
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Influence the target audience through content rather than direct sales: The Michelin Guide is presented as an impartial food travel guide, not a tire catalog used for promotion.
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Continuously and regularly produce content: The latest evaluation results will be updated and announced every year, which means that a restaurant that receives stars this year does not mean that it will rest easy from now on.
But the Michelin Guide does much more than that. It has also created the unique credibility and sense of honor of the Michelin Guide by establishing a professional evaluation system and grand ceremonies. From the original basic requirements for corporate self-media marketing products, it has been further upgraded to a high-level mass media level that builds public trust.
Credibility is not determined by the manufacturer itself, but is formed through the establishment of a professional evaluation system.
The purpose of building corporate self-media is to deliver “useful information” to the target audience. In order to upgrade “useful information” to a “credible” level, the Michelin Guide not only spent a lot of effort and expense, but also established a complete evaluation process and rating system. A restaurant that is not really delicious and has good service cannot be included in the Michelin Guide. Don’t try to buy the ranking or use fraud to gain favor.
From this selection process, we can see how the Michelin Guide has rigorously established the authority of this corporate self-media in the global gourmet market. The Michelin Guide employs full-time professional reviewers to evaluate and judge based on five major standards and six core values, expressing their emphasis on controlling the entire process; this is also incomparable to the general corporate self-media that is concurrently held by internal marketing or public relations personnel. For Michelin, a company that sells tires, in the end, it really operated the Michelin Guide as a separate media, reaching a level that is difficult for ordinary corporate self-media to reach.
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Picture: Taiwan Michelin Tire official website
Create a grand ceremony to attract media publicity and further expand influence
If the sense of food authority created through a professional evaluation mechanism is not extended to ordinary consumers, it will be just a fantasy used by companies for self-pleasure. The “Michelin Guide” held the award ceremony and dinner with great fanfare, attracting media participation, and completely publicized the process and results of the “Michelin Guide” award ceremony. Through these media reports, it established influence in the minds of the general public and formed the trust foundation most needed in content marketing.
No matter how the media guessed the restaurants that might win stars through clues in advance, the organizers insisted on making the official announcement only at the awards ceremony, and did not “release the exclusive” to specific major media in advance. This also represents respect for the ceremony and participating restaurants, and gives the Michelin Guide its well-deserved credibility.
Haruki Murakami said that “sense of ritual” is a very important thing. “Sense of Ritual” is actually the most direct way for people to express their inner emotions. More importantly, “Sense of Ritual” is everywhere. The French fairy tale “The Little Prince” once mentioned that the sense of ritual is to make one day different from other days and one moment from other moments.
The “Michelin Guide” conveys the “ceremonial sense” of international food evaluation through its annual evaluation, and also makes people form a habit and be extra cautious about their affairs, and even be willing to set aside a special time every year to “fly abroad to catch stars.”
Consider how Taiwanese companies should promote content marketing based on the Michelin Guide In the past two days, everyone has been talking about whether the well-known restaurants in Taipei included in the Michelin Guide are qualified to represent Taiwanese cuisine? Some people lamented that it would be difficult to visit that three-star restaurant again. I even saw the well-known broadcasterMa Shifang writing on Facebook, “I’m so happy that none of my favorite restaurants were selected.” You can imagine how much impact and influence it had on everyone once the “Michelin Guide” restaurant reviews were released!
Looking back, let’s think about the development of corporate content marketing. Looking at the current Taiwan’s enterprise self-media, most of them The main purpose of development is still to “promote the company’s own brand information”, and most of them are used as corporate bulletin boards or catalogs; the proportion of truly providing “useful information” to the target audience is not enough, not to mention that there is still a long way to go before producing “credible information”.
For all friends who are engaged in content marketing, this means that there is still a lot of room for development, and there is an opportunity to create corporate self-media similar to the “Michelin Guide” to truly enhance the corporate brand to “[Sell without selling](https://www.contenthacker.today/2018/03/content t-hacker-reading-club-note3.htmlhttps://www.contenthacker.today/2018/03/content-hacker-reading-club-note3.html)” state.
Below, share the complete “Michelin Guide Taipei” list with all your friends. I have to ask a common question, how many stars have you eaten?
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Full record of the release process of the “Michelin Guide Taipei Edition” (Apple Daily):
★Official information:
★Related media reports:
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Apple Daily: [Michelin announced] This table contains the list of 20 star-earning restaurants
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Free Times: Xiangyun Longyin and Sheraton Guest House won 2 Michelin stars!
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Tianxia Magazine: Full list of Taipei Michelin: These 20 restaurants have won 24 stars for Taiwan
★ Picture source: Michelin Guide website, Taiwan Michelin Tire website
★ Vista Reading Club March Special: “[The Era of Resumption of Business is Coming] (https://www.accupass.com/event/1803140753116515393830)”
★ How to learn how to make presentations and use them for content marketing at the same time? Please sign up now for the Content Hacking Lecture Series (CHL6): How to use presentations for content marketing [Registration now]
★ How to produce high-quality and attractive content? Please don’t miss the online course “[Content Power: The Super Power of Building Brands] (https://hahow.in/cr/content-power)“
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