Starbuckification of Cigarettes?!
AdAge.com's Rich Thomaselli reports that RJ Reynolds has a new take on "flavor country" that includes the opening of a new plush Chicago smoking lounge and the creation of a premium line of $8-a-pack cigarettes called Marshall McGearty, named after RJR blend specialist Jerry Marshall and Larry McGearty, creative director at RJR’s Philadelphia-based ad agency, Gyro Worldwide.
According to the article, the lounge, which is in a trendy Chicago neighborhood, "has fresh tobacco leaves and a tobacconist who will hand-roll a pack of cigarettes in any of nine flavors". Marshall McGearty cigarettes can only be purchased at the lounge.
Critics feel that creating such an environment that portrays smoking as an alluring high-end activity among successful young adults will have the same effect on children as past cigarette advertisements, which attempted to paint cigarette smoking in a similar light.
What the cigarette company is trying to do is what Starbucks and some others have done so well. Create a branding experience.
As Tricia Gellman-Holmes, Group Manager of Product Marketing for Creative Professional Products at Adobe, told me in an October 2005 interview for an unrelated article:
"It used to be that people were focused on hyping the greatest feature of their products but what we see today is that people notice a consistent and well-executed brand that highlights not just a feature but an overall experience. Starbucks and the Mini are great examples of this."
But can RJ Reynolds really overcome obstacles such as the law, tons of child and anti-smoking advocacy group campaigns, and awareness of their new strategy to create a profitable premium line of cigarettes? Or, more important, can they create a brand experience that outweighs these factors?
While I haven't been to the lounge or smoked a Marshall McGearty, you, the curious designer, can at least sample a couple of the print ads that RJR will be running to engage potential customers with the their new super high-end habit here and here.
So, what are your thoughts on the effort and the ads?
IMO, it's just an attempt to put a pretty face on an old product in order to recoop a deteriorating customer base. So many doors are closing on the cigarette smoker, providing an environment that is smoke-friendly might be a necessary part of a value added package for the American market. This kind of positioning in the market is based on all the research about a smoker's motivation; the upscale approach certainly fits in and supports the psychological model.
"IMO, it's just an attempt to put a pretty face on an old product in order to recoop a deteriorating customer base."
Possibly, but not as an end. Somehow I think merely recouping a deterioriating customer base isn't an ambitious enough goal for such a company, or any company for that matter.
I personally like the idea of conning cigarette smokers into paying through the nose (as it were) for the privilege of parking themselves in a smoke-filled room. Since the ability to freely smoke in public is fast disappearing, it seems logical for the purveyors of this lethal product to provide locales for its ingestion. In Canada we've already seen this happen with unpasteurized cheese. (Okay, that was a joke.)
Sounds like a mini Red Light District for smokers. Something that smokers will love, but everyone else will view as dirty a bit silly. This sounds cruel, but I don't have a problem with giving people a place to smoke themselves to death, as long as I never have to go in there.