In Retreading Mascot, Michelin Maps Out a More Modern Route

First, the Barbie doll was sent to a plastic surgeon and given a more anatomically correct figure for the ‘90s. Now the world’s most famous fat man since Santa Claus has been put on a crash diet as he nears 100.

Bibendum, the well-known trademark of Michelin, the French company that is the world’s largest tire manufacturer, used to look as though he spent his idle hours table-hopping with the company’s restaurant inspectors, who issue a respected annual guide to French eating places. “Bibendum” and “Monsieur Michelin” has even become synonyms in popular French argot for “obese.”

Not at all the image that the company, which produces 770,000 tires a day at 74 factories on five continents, now wants. In the increasingly important global marketplace, big is decidedly not the same as beautiful.

Worldwide consumer surveys earlier this year disclosed that Americans found Bibendum overweight, and that even in Japan, the land of sumo wrestlers, the young thought he was too chubby.

“Bibendum is supposed to symbolize a company that makes things to help in people’s mobility,” explained Stephane Lepicard, account executive at Carre Noir, a Paris design agency. “We had to bring him clearly into phase with the new tendencies in society: being in shape, well-being, health.”

Even in France, the land of Bibendum’s creation, more people are conscious of the importance of diet and exercise.

This week, Carre Noir and Michelin unveiled the tire man’s new look: a 20% reduction in girth, less baby fat in the cheeks, a more pronounced smile. And instead of running behind a radial tire, as he used to, Michelin’s mascot now stands ready to welcome consumers and looks them straight in the eye.

“He is serene, powerful, respectful, at the service of man,” said Lepicard, whose agency has been working on the new Bibendum since January as part of an overhaul of Michelin’s advertising and promotional strategy. “He used to suffer from cholesterol; now he doesn’t.”

Michelin boasts that its symbol has become one of the 10 best-known on Earth. Imagined by company founders Edouard and Andre Michelin, who were inspired by the sight of a pile of tires, Bibendum was first drawn in April 1898.

In that year, the first advertising posters showed a strange colossus of rubber tires munching nails and broken bottles with the Latin legend, borrowed from the Roman poet Horace, “Nunc est bibendum,” or “It’s now that we must drink.”

The idea was that the tires, which at the beginning were for bicycles, could swallow any obstacle and keep rolling.