Brown & Williamson
Atlanta Speech
Fields
- Original File
- New Products
- Type
- SPCH, SPEECH/PRESENTATION
- CHAR, CHART
- GRAPHIC
- MEETING MATERIALS
- Characteristic
- MARG, MARGINALIAMN Selected
- OK Downgrades
- Named Person
- Johnson, B./X
- Johnston, D./X
- Mccafferty, B./X
- Sanford, R.A./X
- Sexston, J./X
- X/Philip Morris
- Pepples, E./X
- Litigation
- 10004026
- Request
- H80
- Attachment
- 340439
- Author
- Reynolds, M.L.
- Date Loaded
- 24 May 1999
- Brand
- Barclay
- Cambridge
- Carlton
- Kool
- Marlboro
- Merit
- Salem
- Vantage
Document Images
ATLANTA SPEECH
Those of you who were with me in Phoenix in November may remember that
I made two predictions. First that we would be meeting again in
January, which we are, second that we would be in San Diego, which we
very obviously are not. Still, if I can bat 500 with Don Johnston
pitching, I know you all will do a hell of a lot better when you get
all those seemingly impossible ACV targets thrown at you later in the
week.
Something l've learned a little about in these last five months during
which we've taken BARCLAY through an incredibly successful test market
to national introduction is the enormous complexity of getting all
those cigarettes, over 1 billion of them, into over 250,000 outlets at
the right time. And its not Just the cigarettes but the thousands of
pieces of point of purchase and display material. It's mind
boggling. Yet until recently, I took it for granted that it just
happened. So, as I begin to understand what you all have to do, and
the hours you all have to work, and the weather many of you will have
to fight, I'm grateful for this opportunity to let you know some of the
things we in R&D and Manufacturing have done to bring BARCLAY to you.
What l'm going to do in the next 15 minutes, is tell you about the prod-
uct, and the people who brought it to you. And Just as there are
unsung heroes and heroines among all of you who fight and win daily
battles among difficult circumstances, so there are in the laboratories
and factory floors at Hill Street, several hundred people, most of whom
you will never know, who have made all this possible.
Q0

Just over two years ago Bob Sanford, our Vice-President of R&D whom you
met last night, told me he didn't think Brown & Williamson could crack
the ultra low tar market with just another Carlton. I guess Cambridge
proved him right.
What we need, he said, is a filter that gives low tar and low gas but
is easy to draw. What's more, he said, the cigarette should have as
much taste as Merit. Well, I smiled politely, it was close to perfor-
mance evaluation time, and said I'd see what we could do. Frankly, I
felt out of my depth and when I told Bonnie McCafferty about it, as you
can see, she was, for once, speechless. Well, after taking careful aim
at the situation, I decided a blunt instrument would not work and
called instead on Dr. Bob Johnson, Research Scientist. Bob Johnson,
the man who eventually invented the BARCLAY filter, a man who is with
us here today, and a man whom I would like you to Join with me in
honoring now, Bob Johnson.
So let's take an inside view of Bob Johnson's invention.
It's really a very simple invention...like all good inventions are.
The key is that the diluting air which comes in through the tipping
paper does not mix with the smoke until it gets into your mouth. By
making all the smoke go through all the filter slowly, the filter has
time to do its job. We still don't totally understand why it works so
well, but we do have independent verification that its physics provide
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more taste/unit of tar than from any normal filter. When Bob first
invented it, he had it in the cigarettes the wrong way around. He
thought it would give the effect he wanted, but it didn't.
Fortunately, he followed an old scientific principle...let's kick it
and see what happens. What happened was a smoke taste that made him
check his tar analyses. What happened later was a consumer reaction
that we at first didn't believe...and then management didn't
believe...until $200,000 worth of consumer testing made us all
believers. But that's another story which I will come back to later.
Let me return to the people and tell you how we took the basic techno-
logy from lab scale full production.
A product development team was established. We had two problems to
solve--what ingredients to use in the cigarette to provide the best
possible smoking quality, and how to make the products on a commercial
scale. Let's talk about the commercial scale first. Here's where we
started. The filters were made by hand, one at a time. Jack Sexston,
Manager of Machinery Development built a prototype machine which
grooved 200 filters a minute. While this served to satisfy consumer
testing, a faster rate was needed for commercial production. He and
his staff designed the current grooving machines which provide over
2000 filters a minute. A tremendous amount of fine tuning was needed
to make the filters for grooving, and my people worked with Jack's for
months to get the materials and machinery right. At the same time, the
Product Development staff and leaf-blenders were working to find the
right recipes to optimize smoke taste. We looked at over 200

combinations. Some of the blends with the magical-grooved filter were
too strong, even at 1 mg tar. We evaluated the cigarettes ourselves
(PAUSE) with small consumer panels, and in large scale tests by our
Marketing Research Department.
Let's look first at some consumer panel results. Results which compare
BARCLAY's ease of draw with some competitive products. First the KS
product. There are two scales here. The column headed LAB is a
machine measurement. The bigger the number the more the machine has to
work to take a standard draw through the cigarette. Just think of
those numbers as soda straws of different lengths -- in inches. The
machine has to do as much work when it draws on Merit as you would have
to do sipping a drink through a 5.1 inch long soda straw. BARCLAY, on
the other hand, is like sipping through a 1.5 inch soda straw -- one
third of the effort.
The column headed consumer shows consumer ratings on a nine point
scale. Nine is very hard, one is very easy. As you can see, both
machines and people find BARCLAY KS a very easy drawing cigarette.
We have the same story for BARCLAY 100s. It's a longer cigarette so
there's a little more soda straw for the machine to suck through than
on the KS but once again machines and people overwhelmingly agree that
BARCLAY is twice as easy on the draw.
0o

Why is this? Well, it's very simple. All low tar and ultra-low tar
cigarettes have little holes in the tipping to by- pass air away from
the burning end of the cigarette when people or machines puff on them.
They also have fairly dense filters. And in a conventional low tar
this by-pass air has to fight its way through the dense filter fibers.
You have to pull it through. And it's hard work. Not so in BARCLAY.
The by-pass air just zips down the grooves. Effortlessly. Low tar --
easy draw.
Let's look next at panel ratings of strength and flavor. The KS prod-
uct first. The consumer ratings are on a scale of I to 9. Nine means
a lot -- one means very little. In terms of strength and tobacco
flavor, BARCLAY is right in there with Merit; Cambridge and Carlton are
far behind.
The same holds true for BARCLAY 100s -- as strong and flavorful as
Merit. Goodbye Cambridge.
Well, panel results are fine but the real tests are large scale con-
sumer surveys. And our Marketing Research Department did a lot of
them. We were well pleased with the results.
The I mg tar KS product blew other 1 mg products out of the ballpark.
We had never seen preference results like these before in blind tests.
Even KOOL, the #I menthol, only beats Salem 55/45 in blind testing.
1
mg BARCLAY KS achieves the same preference as a cigarette with six
times the tar -- VAntage Ultra Lights.

And we have Just completed tests against Philip Morris' new entry --
Merit Ultra. 500 smokers comparing Merit Ultra with four times the tar
to BARCLAY said BARCLAY is stronger, more flavorful and equally
preferred.
For 3 mg tar BARCLAY 100's, we set our sights even higher. We wanted
to match Merit 100's at 10 mg tar and, as you can see, we very nearly
have. Male full taste 47%, and male Hi Fi 51% smokers like BARCLAY
100's just as well as Merit with 230% more tar. A substantial 42% of
female smokers find it acceptable. But what is even better is that
these are blind tests. We know that when tar levels are revealed,
there are substantial preference shifts to the lower tar products.
Well, I think you'll agree we have some good products. And, by the
way, the 1 mg tar box product is just like the I mg tar soft cup
product. Just as KOOL Box or Marlboro Box are. And I think you'll
find a lot of those M~arlboro Box people going for BARCLAY Box.
And as you'll see, later we have some fantastic advertising. I do want
to explain one line in it -- 99% tar free. Because that simple,
original and refreshing way of drawing attention to BARCLAY's ultra low
tar has produced a chorus of moans and groans from people who wished
they had thought of it first, but didn't.
So what does 99% tar free mean? It meas that i% or less of what comes
out of the cigarette when you smoke it is tar. The other 99% is some-
thing else. Mostly air, a little water vapor, and some trace gases.
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Let's look at the actual numbers. The percentage tar free is one
hundred times the total weight of smoke minus tar weight, all divided
by ~ weight.
For BARCLAY KS this is 357 mg total weight minus i mg tar for a tar
free content of 99.7%.
Now you might ask how can such a little bit of tar go such a long way.
Well, the right stuff presented in the right way can have a large
effect. KOOL smoke is 99.9% menthol free. But that zero point one
percent menthol content of the smoke makes itself known.
In closing, I'd like to address the subject of "how can BARCLAY taste
so good?"
Well, I'm not really going to give you the answer. In part, because we
don't fully understand it ourselves, and some parts that we do under-
stand are opening up new horizons in ultra low tar technology that we
need to keep close to our chests for now.
But one thing is very clear. A steak tastes a whole lot better if you
don't have to break your jaw chewing it. A cigarete tastes a whole lot
better if you don't have to turn your socks inside out to suck in a
mouthful of smoke. And, as you'll remember, BARCLAY has a very easy
draw.
0O

But the question of BARCLAY's good taste is something that has tor-
mented Philip Morris for the last five months. And they have tried
every trick at their disposal to knock us off course. And we want you
to know what they have been up to, because lately, they haven't been
fighting very fair.
Their first move was fair, but clumsy and ill-informed. They said they
had a patent on our filter. Of course, our legal staff had done its
homework and we knew Philip Morris were wrong. Bob Johnson's patent
has been allowed by the U.S. Patent Office and is assigned to Brown &
Williamson.
A few weeks later, they said the grooves collapse when people puff on
cigarettes. Now, it's true you'll see the cork tipping squash into the
grooves sometimes when you crush out a cigarette, but that doesn't
happen in normal smoking of it. We have done experiments with double
reinforcing to proove it. I guess they did the same, because a few
weeks later they came back and said that didn't happen either. The
real problem is they said, that the inside of the smoker's lips fold
over the groove openings when they puff, thus blocking off the diluting
air. Well, we have a lot of evidence that smokers don't smoke BARCLAY
any differently, at least in so far as the tar and nicotine they get,
than any other ultra low tar cigarette. They do smoke BARCLAY differ-
ently though in terms of enjoyment. So our general counsel told the
Philip Morris general counsel, in the most polite and appropriate
language, to shove it.

But the story doesn't end there. We have many instances in the test
market area of Philip Morris salesmen or employees telling BARCLAY pur-
chasers and consumers that the cigarette is somehow fooling the smoking
machine. Well, the cigarette is fooling their scientists. And it is
making fools of their senior management. But it is not fooling the
people who are buying it. They buy it because they like it, and they
like it because it's 99% tar free and the pleasure is back. And you
can feel quite confident in telling them so.
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