No Smoking

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember which cigarette brand claimed to “taste good, like a cigarette should” — even if you don’t smoke. You may also recall which one smokers “would walk a mile for,” which one was “a silly millimeter longer,” and the brand for which they would “rather fight than switch.” (Winston, Camel, Benson & Hedges and Tareyton, of course.)

Some of those taglines haven’t been heard in 40 years, but chances are you remember the products they hawked. That’s how well companies can brand when they spend massively on mass-media ads.

It’s also a thing of the past, at least in the United States. Tobacco marketers are now shut out from the channels — TV, radio, billboards, much of print, branded merchandise — that they were once able to use to promote the romance and allure of smoking. The Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) that the four largest tobacco companies signed with the attorneys general of all 50 states in 1998 shielded the companies from legal judgments for lawsuits over smoking-related diseases, in return for yearly payments to the states.

It also made the firms accept voluntary restrictions on their marketing and advertising efforts, including bans on youth targeting and the use of cartoon characters. Signees are limited to one brand sponsorship a year: no team sports, no brand names in stadiums, and nothing that involves a sizable youth audience. Outdoor advertising is indeed out, and signs outside smoke shops can’t be larger than 14 square feet.

“In late 2007 we announced that for 2008 we would not be doing any print advertising in consumer publications for our cigarette brands,” says David Howard, spokesman for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. “The aim of that is to streamline our focus primarily on point-of-sale marketing, direct-to-consumer or direct mail, and promotion in age-restricted events. We believe that those avenues give us our best opportunity to effectively and responsibly communicate with the only audience we’re interested in communicating with, and that’s adult tobacco consumers.”

(American Spirit, a tobacco brand that’s part of the RJR family, and Reynolds’ Marshall McGearty “artisan” brand are still running some print ads.)

Competitor Philip Morris USA cut far back on cigarette ads in print in 2000 and stated that it would cease buying back-cover ads for its brands. The company says it ran no print cigarette ads in 2005, 2006 or 2007. No. 3 U.S. cigarette manufacturer Lorillard, owned by The Carolina Group, has so far not opted out of print ads for Newport and its other brands.

The Reynolds decision came at the end of a year in which one of its leading brands, Camel, took intense flak for several print campaigns. A supplement inserted into an issue of Rolling Stone last November was criticized for using cartoon illustrations and blurring the ad/edit line.

And Reynolds’ print campaigns earlier last year for the launch of Camel No. 9 led 41 members of Congress to sign a letter asking 11 magazines to stop carrying the ads, on the grounds that the product’s stylish packaging and ad creative targeted young women. (All of the publishers turned down the request.)

“Tobacco firms are keeping a low profile,” University of California at Irvine marketing professor Connie Pechmann told a reporter earlier this year. “They want to calm down the public. The tobacco industry is seeing in smoking bans that people are upset, and their strategy is to be under the radar and keep current smokers.”

EVENT FOCUS

How to keep those current customers coming back? Loyalty programs offering credits for merchandise were a tobacco tactic dating at least back to the coupons on the Old Gold packs. Smokers could once redeem Camel Cash or Marlboro Miles for products, including branded merchandise. But those incentive programs have also mostly gone away.

The Marlboro Miles program ended in 2006, and Camel stopped offering Camel Cash a year ago. Giveaways displaying product logos (like T-shirts and baseball caps) were ruled out by the MSA, but for a few years smokers could still get branded merchandise through redemption programs.

Cigarette marketers now believe such “stuff” is secondary. Some municipal laws prevent lighting up in public, so the companies are running live events in age-restricted places such as bars and nightclubs in locales where smoking bans aren’t in effect.

These have a double benefit: They give the marketers a chance to do sampling with consumers who have volunteered to be marketed to; and they let the brands reinforce ties with smokers who are already their customers, rewarding them with a party, a special event and some carefully unbranded swag.

“Lately we’ve found that [Reynolds’] consumers are not as interested in the items — they’re more interested in experiences,” Howard says. “That’s what our events offer. At one, guests can dress up like rock stars and have a 3-D picture taken. We offer massages. At one of the Camel No. 9 events last year, we provided makeovers. People walked out of there thinking, ‘I understand what Camel No. 9 is, and it speaks to me.’”

Of course, the cigarette companies also use these opportunities to build their databases, asking smokers to sign up for newsletters and e-mail alerts of future events. At RJR events, the company asks to see a legal ID as proof of age and makes opt-ins sign certifications that they are of legal smoking age and want to receive information from a tobacco company. Consumers can get off the mailing list by calling an 800 number that’s noted on every e-mail, every piece of direct mail and every pack of Reynolds’ cigarette brands.

Although carefully managed, live-event tobacco promotions face some issues that may throw into question their future effectiveness as list- and loyalty-building tools. Showing proof of age to attend these events almost always involves handing a driver’s license to a tobacco company representative, either to swipe in a reader or at least to take down personally identifiable data. That gives pause to a lot of anti-smoking advocates who see the companies building databases of what used to be called “replacement smokers” — young. occasional smokers who could be turned into more frequent customers.

In February, Sen. Randy Bass (D-OK) introduced a bill that would make it a misdemeanor to scan driver’s licenses and either store or sell the data collected. The bill, which has the support of the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association, is aimed squarely at tobacco company promotional events. “This is a very slick system, but as a parent it worries me,” Bass said in a statement. “People need to know how aggressively the tobacco companies are working to hook our young people on tobacco.”

SMOKING BANS

As previously mentioned, another problem is the growing number of municipal and state bans on smoking in public spaces, including restaurants and bars. California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey are among the states where you can’t light up in a venue with a kitchen, and cities such as Chicago have passed their own ordinances.

Right now tobacco marketers accommodate these local and state laws on an ad hoc basis. If they can’t let attendees smoke indoors at an event in New York or Chicago, they often set aside outdoor smoking tents. “Would we like these adult consumers to enjoy our products on the spot? Yes, we would,” Reynolds’ Howard says. “But if that can’t happen, these are still good ways to communicate with them in a location where they’re comfortable and feel in play.”

Tobacco companies also have concluded that their future depends on product extensions, with some shrewd diversification. In 2006 Camel combined product design with community building by mailing its adult smoker database and asking for help in arriving at new cigarette formulations. Thirty thousand consumers volunteered.

Those hand-raisers were mailed 16 unmarked sample packs, two packs at a time, and given a PIN with which to access a closed Camel R&D Web site. They were asked to grade the samples for taste and aroma, and rate proposals for logos and packaging.

The final result was an early 2007 roll-out of the Camel Signature series of four color-coded flavors — menthol Frost, Mellow, Robust and a spicy Infused. “It was open-source marketing taken to a very high level,” Howard says. “They told us what they wanted, and we listened.” The company is accepting more package designs for the Camel Signature line on its Web site; visitors can vote for their favorites, and Camel will put those packs out in a limited edition.

Apart from new cigarette recipes, the big U.S. tobacco firms are anticipating that other tobacco products will be keys to their success, affording them a chance to grow sales volume in an increasingly smoke-free climate. Chief among these is snus, a smokeless, spitless tobacco popular in Scandinavia.

Both Camel and Marlboro are now test-marketing branded snus products. Philip Morris also is testing a snus brand — Taboka. And Liggett Group will soon launch a set of flavored snus products under its Grand Prix brand.

These brands are being sold via point-of-purchase displays. But Reynolds has done some age-restricted sampling of its Camel Snus among college students in its Columbus, OH test market. Predictably, tobacco critics have asked the Food and Drug Administration to monitor the snus tests.