Daily Doc: RJR, Apr, 1991: Nicotine tea bags?
Daily Doc: Nicotine tea bags?
Title: R. J. REYNOLDS TOBACCO CO. NON-INDUSTRY MARKETING
LEARNING - 2. NEW BRAND TASK FORCE. PROJECT INFINITY.
RJR, Apr, 1991
Bates #: BATES
April 12, 2000
This document was interesting for its exploitation of people's love for rituals, and its discussion of how to tobacco companies can exploit the human need for rituals to promote cigarettes and smoking. It is interesting to consider, after reading this portion of the document, just how many of our everyday actions may be the result of some corporate microscope on human behavior in the name of marketing, and how marketing has shaped our every day world....
CITATION
Title: R. J. REYNOLDS TOBACCO CO. NON-INDUSTRY MARKETING
LEARNING - 2. NEW BRAND TASK FORCE. PROJECT INFINITY.
Type of Document: Report
Author: Delta Research - Fay, J.E. , Douglas L. and Popp T.
Recipient: R J Reynolds Tobacco Co.
Date: 19910400
Page Count: 48
Bates No. 514293944 -3991
Site: R.J. Reynolds Document Site http://www.rjrtdocs.com/
URL: To find this document, go to the RJR document site and enter, as "Quick Search" criteria the phrase "non-industry marketing learning" (just like that, but without quotation marks).
QUOTES (from pages 34-36 of the document)
Effective use of "Ritual"
- Corona beer would be just another imported beer were it not for the brilliantly conceived squeeze-a-slice-of-lime and drop-it-in-the-bottle ritual that was added to the marketing of the product. The lime-in-a-botle ritual serves one key purpose - fun.
- Oreo cookies, as every child and many adults know, has its own unique ritual - peel apart the cookies, lick the frosting from the middle and then eat the cookies. It just wouldn't be as much fun to eat an Oreo without the ritual.
- Baking a cake has been one of the ways a wife and mother showed her family how much she loved them for generations. The operative word is "baking" because it is the labor that counts. Just buying a ready-made cake isn't good enough because it supplants the ritual of loving labor. This is what Pillsbury found when it introduced the first instant cake mix in the late '50s
The first cake mixes contained all the necessary ingredients except milk - and they failed. They failed, market research later showed, not because they didn't work, but because they eliminated all of the loving ritual of baking a cake. The mixes were just too instant.
Marketing researchers went to work and dissected the ritual of baking a cake. What they found was that there was an essential minimum component of the ritual: adding eggs. Product developers reformulated the mixes, removing the powdered eggs, and put not-quite-so-instant cake mixes back on the shelf. With the essential minimum component of ritual restored, the product was successful. That was thirty years ago. ...Today the ritual of cake baking has evolved so that today using a cake mix is considered by most women to be a "scratch" cake...
ANALYSIS
Rituals serve several purposes and seem to have a generally positive connotation:
Enhance fun and pleasure
Promote safety
Enhance self-esteem, or self-image
Make it easier to get routine tasks completed
To bring good luck or ward off bad luck (superstitions)...
IDEAS
Cigarette smoking is filled with ritual. The problem is that the ritual is the same regardless of the brand.... A crazy idea for an improved cigarette and a fun ritual to go with it ....Cigarettes get stale, in part, because they get dry sitting on the store shelf. If micro-encapsulated water...were added to the tobacco, water would be available to moisten the tobacco just prior to smoking, if a way could be found to break the micro-capsules and release the water. ...The answer is to...[create] a fun an uniquely differentiating ritual that prompts consumers to crush the cigarettes and release the micro-encapsulated moisture before smoking (this concept was exposed to consumers during focus groups in Grand Junction and Denver)... ...Because of increasing restrictions against smoking, it is getting more and more difficult for smokers to enjoy tobacco. There should be an opportunity for a radically different substitute products.
Imagine a tobacco-based coffee-like drink. The product would have the following requirements and advantages:
Fulfills the physical pleasures of tobacco. Namely taste, smell and nicotine. Allows satisfying rituals associated with coffee drinking to accompany consumption of tobacco. Allows users of the substitute tobacco product to blend in unnoticeably and unoffensively with non-smokers. If the product were packaged in individually sealed "tea bags," users could carry them
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Anne Landman, Regional Program Coordinator
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Grand Junction, CO
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