Sponsor (June-Sept 1960)

COUPON SNOWSTORM: 35 MILLION A MONTH FROM RALEIGH BUYERS ^Jldest of B&W cigarette brands is coupon-laden Raleigh which carved out a small but solid segment of the market and is still going strong. • Raleigh's big initial success with its couponing program came in Depression-ridden 1930's. When wartime shortages forced abandonment of premium offers, Raltigh sales dropped 75%. Resumption of couponing in 1949 doubled volume in less than a year. • Today B&W is redeeming Raleigh coupons at the rate of 35 million a month, a 13% rise over 1959. • Raleigh, which is handled by Keyes, Madden & Jones, gets tv promotion via B&W's stable of network and syndication programs. • Coupon redemption is charged up as advertising expenses; this year will top S3 million. • Because of the continued health of the coupon program, B&W is bringing out a new expanded premium catalogue with nearly 300 items — the first major changes in couponing procedure since World War II. Most popular B&W premium: electric perculators. during this same 10-year period. One phase of it began in the early 1910s when American Tobacco introduced king size Pall Mall. As usual, industry conservatives sneered that the king size was an "unimportant novelty; it'll never catch on." But Pall Mall, almost without competition in its early years, did catch on, and by the end of the 1940's had chiseled out such a sizeable hunk of the cigarette market that every other manufacturer began scurrying to get out both king size and regular brands. A somewhat similar toppling of traditional thinking came a few years later when Marlboro scored with its flip-top box. From that point on there was do such thing as a single standard package in the cigarette field. But the real hammer blow which shattered the industry's rigid marketing patterns fell just as the decade of the '50's was beginning. This was the publication in Reader's Digest and other print media of lurid stories purporting to link cigarette smoking with lung cancer. In the resultant country-wide scare, sales of regular cigarette brands sagged while filters, until then a compartively unimportant part of the market started to climb spectacularly. And B&W, securely set with a well-established filter brand in Viceroy, began to cash in on the medical scare. Sales of mentholated cigarettes, particularly those with filters, also started to move. And B&W's Kool chalked up significant gains. The cigarette industry, which lei than 10 short years before lu seemed firmly rooted in an imperial able cement of single-size, singl. package, and single-tobacco blen marketing had suddenly become fragmentized, segmentized business. As the '50's progressed, the mentation became even more acut As B&W president Cutchins poin out, smokers today have their choic ot non-niter cigarettes in regular ( king size, filter cigarettes with van ing degrees of filtration, menthe cigarettes with medium or mild mer thol in filter or non-filter types, and wide variety of packages. This breaking open of the mark* offered special opportunities to aggressive, and imaginative manufai turer, like B&W, which had built ij business on appealing to specialize tastes. B&W taps new outlets In addition, the 1950-1960 perio completely revolutionized old terns of cigarette distribution, an again B&W benefited. Following World War II the musl rooming supermarket industry bega to emerge as a major factor in th sale of cigarettes. Whereas tobacco and drugstore had been the mainstays of cigaretl marketers, supermarkets more tha doubled their volume in the '50's an today are easily the most importar single type of cigarette outlet. John W. Burgard, v. p. in charg of advertising, told sponsor last wee that B&W estimates that at least S0| of all their sales are through supei markets alone ( not including othe grocery outlets I. Tobacco stores, which once dotte likely corner locations in e\er\ ina o U.S. city, are now fading almost el tirely out of the picture. And othe distribution outlets have not show any significant gains. Vending machines, for instance, a( count for 15% of the total U.S. ciga rette sales, almost exactb the sa n share they held in 1950. For the tobacco industry the si ii to supermarket selling has produt & a number of rather startling changes Take carton sales, for example. Ac cording to Burgard at least 662/$ of B&W"s sales through supermarket are done by the carton, and the p'O (Please turn to page 72 ) 36 SPONSOR • 8 AUGUST 196fl