Finding a Healthy Balance

Upcoming European tyre labelling and associated regulations are serving as a laxative for some tyre manufacturers, while others are relishing their implementation. Counted amongst this second category is Michelin, who sees similarities between the label and its own ‘innovation strategy’ – the tyre maker’s focus upon three areas it sees as inseparable: Reducing vehicle fuel consumption, ensuring outstanding safety performance and offering greater total mileage.

Michelin’s vice president of Technical Communication, Pascal Couasnon, says the French manufacturer “applauds” the new European legislation and tyre label. In fact, he discloses that Michelin would have been pleased to have seen the labeling criteria taken even further: “We want to be in conformity with the [European Union] regulations, but longevity is a battleground,” he elaborates. “We believe it can’t be omitted from the label.”

This emphasis upon longevity, as we will see, stems from research Michelin commissioned several years ago. Desiring to gain a greater insight into European consumers’ wants and needs, the tyre maker engaged TNS Automotive, a leading market research firm employing over 200 researchers within the region, to study what qualities replacement market customers actually look for in a tyre. “We conducted a wide set of exploratory research with Michelin in Europe over the course of five years,” states TNS Automotive director Guillaume Saint. “The aim has been to answer a simple question – what is the optimum tyre from a consumer perspective?”

The answer, it appears, is a tyre that drivers don’t need to think about. As Saint explains it, “consumers say ‘what I want above all is everything a tyre has to cope with, without having to think about it too much.’ They want to forget the tyres when they drive.” Yet Saint adds that this ambivalence flies out the window when it comes to purchasing replacement tyres – while drivers don’t want to think about their tyres on a daily basis, purchasing the right replacement is considered a highly important decision. “We see that 75 per cent of Europeans decide on their own accord to replace their tyres,” Saint reports. “And almost one European tyre purchaser out of every two agrees on the following sentence: ‘when it comes to buying tyres, I know exactly what I want.’ As you can see, when it comes to replacing tyres, people are really involved.”

According to Saint, TNS found three criteria to be of major importance to European consumers: longevity, safety and economy – the three priorities that now form the basis of Michelin’s innovation strategy. Using a ‘trade off’ questionnaire format, TNS asked respondents to compare several tyre performance qualities against each other. After working with a wide number of respondents, Saint states that TNS was able to identify for Michelin which criterion heads the consumer list: “Longevity seems to be the most important one. However safety – if taking into account the two criteria of roadholding on dry roads and wet braking – appears to be at roughly the same level. So safety is the second most important dimension. The third dimension appears to be choice of brand. Brand reputation acts as a real driver of choice in the consumer market. The fourth dimension is price and the reduction of fuel consumption and the last relates to comfort and the reduction of CO2 emissions.”

As you may have noticed, the top consumer criterion – longevity – is absent from the tyre label. This may be interpreted by some as being another instance in which government prescribes what is important instead of listening to what people actually want. As Couasnon explains, the European Union selected rolling resistance, wet braking and noise as its three criteria because it wanted to concentrate on safety and the environment when implementing a label; additionally, tyre longevity and wear is extremely complicated and expensive to measure. Despite its omission from the label, Couasnon says the tyre maker will voluntarily educate consumers on this factor along with the other criteria: “At Michelin we will inform more on longevity.”

Another pattern TNS research picked up on is that consumers do not want a tyre with impressive strengths in just one specific criterion; an ‘all-rounder’ is preferred. Using German respondents as an example, Saint reports that tyres with moderate strengths in all main criteria were much more highly favoured than those with particular strengths in only one or two – in other words, a good balance is important. As he sums up, the “best tyre is definitely one that is able to offer an equal balance of performance between safety, peace of mind and value for money – so that the driver is able to forget about the tyre until it is next replaced.”

Finding a correct balance, reflects Pascal Couasnon, is difficult. He acknowledges it is easy to focus on one particular factor, such as rolling resistance, and improve performance there, and indeed Michelin feels no shame in conceding that some rival tyre brands fair better on certain specific measurements – as this performance does not continue across the board. “We are not always the best on every criteria,” admits Couasnon, “but the important thing, as said before, is finding a balance between the various criteria. It won’t be possible [in 2012] to market a tyre with strengths in just one area.”

The November 2012 introduction of the aforementioned legislation doesn’t have Michelin reaching for the worry beads – its work on a ‘balanced’ tyre began almost two decades ago when the Michelin R&D teams set to work reducing rolling resistance without affecting other key tyre properties. In 1992 the French manufacturer introduced silica into the compound of its first-generation Energy tyre, which incidentally was the first Michelin tyre to wear the ‘Green X’ logo. Today Michelin is producing the fourth generation of tyre to use this technology and its work on new innovations to create the optimal balance continue.