TOBACCO: It’s the Menthol That Counts

Tobacco stands in dozens of U.S. cities last week sported cigarette brands that few U.S. smokers had ever seen. To the amazement of many a dealer, packages of the new brands were snapped up by intense young men with briefcases and suspiciously bulging pockets. Who were the young men? They were agents for U.S. cigarette companies, anxiously collecting their competitors’ new smokes to rush them back to the laboratory for analysis. Undeterred by the cancer reports—cigarette sales are running 5% ahead of 1958—U.S. cigarette companies have taken off on a scramble to grab a bigger share of the $4¼ billion-a-year cigarette market. Each hopes to turn the trick by outdoing its competitors with new cigarettes that offer the U.S. smoker everything from rum flavor to air-conditioned paper.

The boom in menthol cigarettes is the hottest fad to strike the industry since filters. Almost overnight, menthols have grabbed 10% of the market, are expected to crack 13% by year’s end. Makers have discovered to their delight that menthol carries a vague connotation of healthful medication, especially attracts women with its taste.

Vita Manga Est. Last week the menthol drive reached its peak of intensity, proclaimed by full-page ads that touted every gimmick that adman can conceive and machine execute. Philip Morris (Marlboro, Parliament) launched Alpine on a national scale, billed it not only as a long, low-tar, lightly mentholated cigarette with “the longest filter yet,” but as one of the few cigarettes since Camel to come in a package with a picture on it (of an Alpine mountain). Brown & Williamson, whose “Thinking Man” Viceroys thoughtlessly slumped 20% in the first quarter, clawed back with two new filters: the mentholated Belair, whose pack also boasts a picture: blue sky with snow-white clouds, and the non-mentholated, “high filtration” Life, whose motto, encrusted on every package in Latin, is: “Life Is Great.” P. Lorillard Co. (Kent, Newport, Old Gold) brought out Spring, a tastefully packaged king with “lightest menthol” and “honeycomb filter.”

President Bowman Gray of R. J. Reynolds Co., whose Salem is already a mentholated success, was so affected by the sight of all this clamoring at his door that he took a drastic step for the head of a billion-dollar hierarchy. He insisted on answering his own telephone, gave battle orders that he wants to be flashed personally by even the lowliest Reynolds salesman on every development on the cigarette front.

New-Mown Hay. No longer unanimously sure that “it’s the tobacco that counts” (as filters rose, the quality of tobacco dropped), makers are spending more than $5,000,000 to promote each major new brand and find the gimmick that will open the golden doors. Most of the new menthol brands are rolled in “high-porosity” paper that lets in more air and cools the smoke. Some makers are toying with fancier flavors than menthol. Market researchers have convinced one major company that, as gimmicks continue to take out more and more of the natural tobacco taste, the U.S. public will accept the taste and aroma of pineapple, coconut, cinnamon, carnation, apple blossom and even new-mown hay in its cigarettes. Said the company’s spokesman: “Root beer is a natural.” U.S. Tobacco Co. has reported strong sales—but declines to give figures—for its rum-and-maple-flavored Mapleton. Apparently buyers can sniff the brand out on the counters; it is one of the few in the industry with no advertising budget.

Playing both the health and flavor angles, a former Marlboro market researcher named Gerald Schaflander, 39, has scrubbed off his hand tattoo, begun manufacturing a brand (Vanguard) that, he trumpets, has “NO tobacco tars, NO nicotine and, more important, NO arsenic!” The reason: Vanguards also have no tobacco. They are made of nine vegetable fibers, chemically treated and processed with an incenselike aromatic flavoring, and they put Schaflander way ahead in the new-mown hay category. Enthused a Vanguard executive: “There is a need for a non-tobacco product to give the smoker what he wants in a cigarette: oral gratification, nervous gratification, social poise, something to do with his fingers.”

Whatever smokers need, topline U.S. tobacco manufacturers are getting all the gratification they need out of cigarettes that stick to tobacco. Last week front-running Reynolds reported that its first half sales jumped 13% to $611 million, and profits soared 16% to $43 million. American Tobacco’s sales jumped 7% to $563 million, Liggett & Myers 3% to $274 million—and profits rose apace.