Tweet
Firstly, whilst I am not a smoker, I do enjoy the odd cigar every now and again... I am also a business/marketing strategist by profession.
Most countries around the world have banned or controlled cigarette advertisements and enacted legislation to curb the places where one can light up. Furthermore, most jurisdications mandate a government health warning in one form or another.
Every smoker I have talked to has their preferred brand (Malboro light, Dunhill, Silkcut etc etc etc etc) or will buy a certain brand due to advertising or promotion.
What I would propose, if I were the preverbial emperor for a day, would be to ban all forms of branding, promotion or marketing (except for government health warnings) on cigarette packets. Ergo, the only thing you would see on the store shelf would be a small white carboard box with the warning that smoking may harm your unborn baby.
How would this control or bring down the tobacco companies you ask?
Well I shall answer that with a question. If you can not tell which brand you are buying (due to the lack of promotion or branding on the packet) how can you buy your favourite malboros, silkcuts or dunhills? The confusion would mean that consumers would get gradually cheesed off as they would continually be smoking something other than their brand and the companies would be unable to forecast sales.
As the only differeniation between manufacturers/distributors would be price (advertsing and branding having been curtailed), rival companies would be discounting eachother for any form of market leverage. Of course, over time, this would eat into profit margins and gradually erode the value of these companies assets. People invest in companies with records of solid planning, good governance and reliable track performance. If sales are random, track record becomes worthless and planning becomes non-existent, thus accelerating the capital flight.
Additionally, how would the same companies be able to forecast sales if they had no marketing data to base their production figures on? As sales, and by extension production companies, will experience massive fluctuations due to random sales figures, the producers (farmers of tobacco) would be unable to plant with any degree of certainty of selling their crop and would over a period of time be forced to plant more stable cash crops to ensure a modicum of enconomic stability.
Please feel free to puncture holes in this idea....
Most countries around the world have banned or controlled cigarette advertisements and enacted legislation to curb the places where one can light up. Furthermore, most jurisdications mandate a government health warning in one form or another.
Every smoker I have talked to has their preferred brand (Malboro light, Dunhill, Silkcut etc etc etc etc) or will buy a certain brand due to advertising or promotion.
What I would propose, if I were the preverbial emperor for a day, would be to ban all forms of branding, promotion or marketing (except for government health warnings) on cigarette packets. Ergo, the only thing you would see on the store shelf would be a small white carboard box with the warning that smoking may harm your unborn baby.
How would this control or bring down the tobacco companies you ask?
Well I shall answer that with a question. If you can not tell which brand you are buying (due to the lack of promotion or branding on the packet) how can you buy your favourite malboros, silkcuts or dunhills? The confusion would mean that consumers would get gradually cheesed off as they would continually be smoking something other than their brand and the companies would be unable to forecast sales.
As the only differeniation between manufacturers/distributors would be price (advertsing and branding having been curtailed), rival companies would be discounting eachother for any form of market leverage. Of course, over time, this would eat into profit margins and gradually erode the value of these companies assets. People invest in companies with records of solid planning, good governance and reliable track performance. If sales are random, track record becomes worthless and planning becomes non-existent, thus accelerating the capital flight.
Additionally, how would the same companies be able to forecast sales if they had no marketing data to base their production figures on? As sales, and by extension production companies, will experience massive fluctuations due to random sales figures, the producers (farmers of tobacco) would be unable to plant with any degree of certainty of selling their crop and would over a period of time be forced to plant more stable cash crops to ensure a modicum of enconomic stability.
Please feel free to puncture holes in this idea....
. (unless I'm really jonesing 
Comment