Friday, April 15, 2011

Tobacco Company to Develop Products without Tobacco

BAT company
British American Tobacco (BAT) PLC announced their plans to create a new company called Nicoventures Ltd. which will produce products made without tobacco and with only pure nicotine in an effort to offer a safer alternative to smokers. Even though a spokeswoman of the organization said the products the company is considering aren’t on the market yet and declined to give any more details, we do know that two subsidiaries of Altria Group are testing spit-free tobacco-coated toothpicks in an effort to offer tobacco in a less socially scrutinized way.

If successful, the products of Nicoventures could help wean smokers off cigarettes. It is the hope of BAT that Nicoventures will be a highly profitable business that will help make up for the loss in profits due to the decrease in cigarette sales and the scrutiny faced by tobacco companies. “Nicoventures could be a hugely positive development from the public health point of view, in reducing the harm from smoking”, said David Sweanor of the University of Ottawa in Canada. However, he did admit he was a bit skeptic, saying that nothing currently on the market had the ability to match the sensational and psychological effects of a cigarette that smokers crave for.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

KT&G rules slim cigarette market with best-selling Esse

esse brand
What is the best-selling cigarette brand in the world? Most smokers would name one from multinational juggernauts Philip Morris, British-American Tobacco (BAT) or Japan Tobacco.
As far as super-slim cigarettes are concerned, however, Korea’s KT&G dominates with its Esse cigarettes brand, which has steadily remained in the lead.
The country’s largest tobacco manufacturer said Monday that it sold 42.2 billion cigarettes of Esse last year to chalk up a 44.5-percent growth from 2009 when 29.2 billion were sold.
In particular, the Seoul-headquartered outfit almost doubled its exports of Esse from 11.2 billion cigarettes in 2009 to 20.8 billion last year to top the podium in competition with Virginia Slims marketed by Philip Morris and Vogue by BAT.
In 2009, the latest data available, Esse racked up sales of 29.2 billion cigarettes compared to 17 billion for Virginia Slim and 11 billion for Vogue, according to London-based consultancy Euromonitor International.
“Since its inception in 1996, we have nurtured Esse as a global brand. It is currently available in around 40 states and regions including Russia and the Middle East,’’ said Huh Up, who is in charge of the firm’s global businesses.
“In particular, Esse is presently the top-selling super-slim cigarette in Iran, Uzbekistan and Indonesia. In Russia it accounts for more than 10 percent in the segment.’’
Huh added that the former state monopoly has tapped into the global markets throughout the past decade as the local market showed saturation.
In achieving its initiative to make Esse a global product, KT&G demonstrated its potential at various events.
Currently, it accounts for 85 percent of the domestic consumption of super-slim tobaccos.
When its sub brand Esse Soun debuted in 2006, it took just eight days to reach the benchmark of selling 10 million packs in the shortest period in the history of the company.
Esse also boasts of other sub brands such as the premium Esse Golden Leaf as well as Esse Edge which targets young smokers.
“On top of exporting Esse to other countries, we have established a set of factories abroad to generate products with local relevance,’’ Huh said.
“In addition to Esse, we are determined to foster a host of globally famous brands through vigorous efforts to become a genuine international player.’’
Indeed, KT&G channeled up to $100 million in order to set up production lines of the Esse products in the Kaluga region, approximately 150 kilometers of south of Moscow, last October.
The factories churn out 4.6 billion cigarettes per year targeting the smokers of the world’s second-largest market in terms of sales, trailing just China.
In addition, the company also operates cigarette factories in Turkey and Iran, both of which opened in early 2008 with a combined annual capacity of 5.6 billion cigarettes.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Plainly put, cigarette packaging matters

Marlboro packaging types
This week our government committed itself to the removal, albeit slowly, of cigarette displays in shops. But plain packaging on cigarettes has been delayed for further consultation.

The Unite union is unimpressed. It represents 6,000 people in tobacco production and distribution, and put out a statement: “Switching to plain packaging will make it easier to sell illicit and unregulated products, especially to young people.” This, the union added, “may increase long-term health problems”.

Tory MP Philip Davies said: “Plain packaging for cigarettes would be gesture politics … it would have no basis in evidence.”

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not, sadly, their own facts. Cigarette packaging has been used for brand-building and sales expansion, and that is bad enough; but it has also been used for many decades to sell the crucial lie that cigarettes which are “light”, “mild”, “silver”, and the rest, are somehow safer.

This is one of the most important con tricks of all time: people base real decisions on it, even though low-tar cigarettes are just as bad for you as normal cigarettes, as we have known for decades. Manufacturers’ gimmicks, like the holes on the filter beside your fingers, confuse laboratory smoking machines, but not people. Smokers who switch to lower-tar brands compensate with larger, faster, deeper inhalations, and by smoking more cigarettes.

The collected data from a million people shows that those who smoke low-tar and “ultra-light” cigarettes get lung cancer at the same rate as people who smoke normal cigarettes. They are also, paradoxically, less likely to give up smoking.

So the “light”, “pale” and “mild” packaging sells a lie. But do people know this? In data from two population-based surveys, a third of smokers believed incorrectly that “light” cigarettes reduce health risks, and were less addictive (it’s 71% in China (pdf)). A random telephone-digit survey of 2,120 smokers found they believed on average that “ultra lights” convey a 33% reduction in risk. A postal survey of 500 smokers found a quarter believed “light” cigarettes are safer. A school-based questionnaire of 267 adolescents found once again, as you’d expect, that they incorrectly believed “light” cigarettes to be healthier and less addictive.

Where do all these incorrect beliefs come from? Careful manipulation by the tobacco industry, as you can see for yourself, in their internal documents available for free online. They explicitly planned to deter quitters with “mild” products, which were made to seem safer and less addictive.

But more than 50 countries, including the UK, have now banned a few magic words like “light” and “mild”. So is that enough? No. A survey of 15,000 people in four countries (pdf) found that after the UK ban, there was a brief dip in false beliefs, but by 2005 we bounced back to having the same false beliefs about “safer-looking” brands as the US.

This is because brand packaging continues to peddle these lies. A street-interception survey (pdf) from 2009 of 300 smokers and 300 non-smokers found that people think packages with “smooth” and “silver” in the names are safer, and that cigarettes in packaging with lighter colour, and a picture of a filter, were also safer.

Of course tobacco companies know this (pdf). As the Philip Morris tobacco company said in an internal document, entitled Marketing New Products in a Restrictive Environment: “Lower delivery products tend to be featured in blue packs. Indeed, as one moves down the delivery sector, then the closer to white a pack tends to become. This is because white is generally held to convey a clean, healthy association.”

If you’re in doubt of the impact this can have, “brand imagery” studies show that when participants smoke the exact same cigarettes presented in lighter coloured packs, or in packs with “mild” in the name, they rate the smoke as lighter and less harsh, simply through the power of suggestion. These illusory perceptions of mildness, of course, further reinforce the false belief that the cigarettes are healthier.

But these aren’t the only reasons why banning a few words from packaging isn’t enough. A study of 600 adolescents, for example, found that plain packages increase the noticeability, recall, and credibility of warning labels.

There’s no real doubt that the extended, complex, interlocking branding and packaging machinations of cigarette companies play a big role in misleading smokers about the risks, by downplaying them, and sadly nothing from Unite – for shame – or some Tory MP will change that.

If you don’t care about this evidence, or you think jobs are more important than people killed by cigarettes, or you think libertarian principles are more important than both, then that’s a different matter. But if you say the evidence doesn’t show evidence of harm from branded packaging, you are simply wrong.

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