Joe Camel, Meet George Generic

Posted on by Chief Marketer Staff

It’s been a year and a half since tobacco companies sat down with a roomful of attorneys general and agreed to pay huge fines and remove themselves to the recesses of the American marketing landscape in return for the law enforcers’ promise that they would no longer allow citizens to file $100 million lawsuits over cases of stained teeth.

Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, et al, made a deal to voluntarily refrain from a host of activities that would cost the promotion industry an estimated $4 billion. No more outdoor advertising, sports sponsorships, branded premiums, or sampling. Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man would be dispatched to advertising heaven. Point-of-purchase would be limited to tiny, clinical, black-on-white signs – only one to a brand, please.

Funny thing is – as senior editor Betsy Spethmann’s bar promotions story on page 28 attests – consumer promotion of cigarettes is still alive and well. What has transpired in the time since the tobacco agreement only adds fuel to the notion that the only predictable thing about government is its unpredictability.

Shortly after the agreement was announced, the holier-than-thou crew pounced. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and ex-FDA chief David Kessler said the $365 billion settlement figure was far too low. Pressure from activists led to a bill championed by Sen. John McCain, who crossed party lines to campaign for more stringent controls. The bill was defeated and, as of this writing, attorneys general from at least eight states were hammering out their own deals with tobacco companies with controls more lenient than in the original agreement.

While Joe Camel will most probably remain in forced retirement, early word was that the Marlboro Man would be cleared to ride the marketing range. Also off the table: restrictions on magazine ads, FDA regulation, and draconian P-O-P limits.

Attorneys general can make the deals without legislative approval because they do not include protections against class-action suits. Tobacco companies have been riding a wave of favorable court decisions.

Freedom works in mysterious ways.

We recently had the chance to talk with Bob Bexon, senior vice president of Brown & Williamson, and get a sense of what life was like inside a marketing fishbowl. Bexon’s attitude: not much different from what it is on the outside.

Bexon’s a marketer with some under-leveraged brands, getting outspent on all sides by RJR and Philip Morris, and he’s going to do everything he possibly can do to turn the tide. Asked if he has contingency plans for his $350 million marketing budget should Uncle Sam pull the plug on certain methods and tactics, Bexon replied he did not. “We proceed as though the regulatory climate existing now will continue to exist,” said the affable yet determined Bexon, a Canadian who resembles Paul Newman as the hockey coach in Slapshot, sans the cheesy leather jacket.

Bexon faces an interesting marketplace challenge. Brown & Williamson’s most valuable equity is Kool, a brand that defined menthols since its intro in the ’30s, and which dominated the segment until the ’70s. Little had been done with the brand since then, however, and Philip Morris’s Newport brand now commands menthols with a 7 share, about double that of Kool.

B&W’s volume driver, meanwhile, is GPC, one of the most perplexing products, perhaps, in all of consumer marketing. It is a generic in a category that lives or dies on image, and yet GPC holds a phenomenal 6 share of the U.S. cigarette market. That’s half-again what old Joe Camel was able to drum up for his brand.

Kool has new packaging, a new ad campaign, a continuity program in the works, and a line extension – Kool Natural, with natural menthol flavors.

But if you wan’t to know if cigarette marketing is dead, all you have to do is check out what’s in store for GPC. Bexon is convinced that Brown & Williamson can succeed in pumping image-oriented, brand equity into a black-and-white package whose user profile – in New York City, at least – is not the Marlboro Man, but the Homeless Man.

“We’ve found that one-third of GPC buyers are switchers who turn to it occasionally for price,” said Bexon. “But the other two-thirds only smoke GPC. These are people in the Midwest and West who drive Chevy Trucks and take pride in quality and value. There’s a good base there to begin building equity, though maybe not a New York-style equity.”

B&W got the GPC ball rolling last summer in a concert-tour sponsorship with Country Western star George Strait. “That got us into bar promotions in places I didn’t even know existed, country music bars where they do this line dancing,” said Bexon. “You wouldn’t believe how well GPC was accepted in these places.”

Alas, though we may never see Joe Camel’s likes again, here comes George Generic. Marketing is some resilient little animal, no?

“There are 43 million people in America who smoke, and they want communication about the products they use,” said Bexon. “They will get their information somehow, some way, even if the government bans ads and promotions.”

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