Tobacco Products Control Act Trial
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very aggressive marketplace.
So-those sorts.-of-funds--allocated for the first
three (3) years of a new brand are disporportionately
high and had we projected this out for ten (I0) years,
that proportion would have diminished once the brand was
established.
Now, was third family targeted against any particular
brand in the marketplace and, if so, is that what I see
on page nineteen (19) of this?
Yes. At the time of the writing of this plan, we looked
very carefully at our competition and third family was
particularly directed at the brand Craven, which was one
of the brands of Rothmans, and against DuMaurier,
perhaps the strongest brand in the segment; certainly
the strongest brand in the segment which was an Imperial
brand.
So that looking at the strategic plan you will see,
then, a general allocation by percentages of available
resources as forecast over the next three (3) days, and
we'll-come back to that plan, but I would like to go
now, so the Court may have an immediate idea, and ask
you, Mr. Hoult, in general terms, how much you have been
spending or were spending on advertising prior to the
ban, and I have ...
Now, Mr. Hoult, I had asked you if you could have
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prepared a document which would show your total
advertising and promotional spending,-.historically going
from nineteen eighty-seven (1987) back to nineteen
seventy-six (1976), with a breakdown, not in great
detail, but a breakdown. Is this the document which...
A- Yes, it is.
Q- ..shows that? Can I have that marked, please, as RJR...
THE COURT:
3.
Me IRVING:
3.
Q- Let's just take one (i) year, Mr. Hoult, and if you
could just explain tO His Lordship what these figures
represent?
A- Which year would you...
Q- I think we'll take nineteen eighty-seven (1987) and -- I
see it's three fifteen (3H15), My Lord, if you were
going to take the afternoon adjournment, as planned,
I'll leave this until we come back. If not, I'll
just
carry on.
THE COURT:
We'll take a ten (i0) minute break.
SHORT RECESS
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Me IRVING:
Q - Now, Mr..Hoult,.looking.at~RJR-3, let,s take..a single
year -- it won't be necessary to do it for more than
that -- take nineteen eighty-seven (1987).
THE COURT:
Q - Okay, are we dealing in -- I can't read the top of the
page.
A - Canadian dollars, My Lord.
Q - Yes, Canadian.
Me IRVING:
Thousands of dollars.
THE COURT:
Thousands?
Me IRVING:
Yes.
THE COURT:
So I have to multiply the number by one thousand
(i,000)?
Me IRVING:
Just add.three. (3) zeros.
So that print advertising then is one point four (1.4)
million dollars?
Correct.
And the signs are six point eight (6.8)?
Correct.
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Am
Now, what is production?
Production is.the cost. that.an..advertising agency and
its printers incur in producing the advertisements,
either in magazines, billboards or -- or for -- so
that's the actual printing cost.
All right. And agency fees, is that the ad agency?
Yes, this is the fee that an advertising agency gets for
giving you its service over the year, and that fee is
based conventionally as a proportion of your total
billings, your total advertising expenditures.
Now, point of sale?
Point of sale is that material which is used in the
retail outlets. Conventionally, point of sale would be
paper or cardboard.
We have sponsorships, which you've already dealt with.
What is research, first of all?
Research, in this context, refers to marketing research,
and that is the cost of carrying out our consumer
studies of various sorts and it amounts to the fees
which we pay. to our~market research agencies who. do ~this
work for us.
Finally, and by far the largest item, is retail. What
is that?
Retail is the sum total of all payments that you make to
the retail trade, either in cash or in products, in
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order for you to, for example, put up a counter unit
display-wher~e~you'.re,-say, having, a~specialoon Vantage,
you will have a counter unit, you would pay for that.
You also pay for the amount of space behind the counter
typically, that you are buying to display your products.
Now, in our case, as a company, we have sales cycles
which each are six (6) weeks in length. And each sale
cycle has a special program and you pay the retail trade
for this.
Q - Just follow His Lordship's pen a bit, Mr. Hoult, because
His Lordship is trying to take notes as we go along, so
try to keep the timing.
THE COURT:
No, numbers is okay.
Me IRVING:
Q - All right, so that, RJR-3, now...
THE COURT:
Q - I see that has increased a lot since nineteen
seventy-six (1976) in the retail...
A - Yes.
Q - ... versus the rest of the...
A - That is a very -- very marked phenomenon, not just in
our business but, I think, in marketing generally, that
as the power of the retail trade increases versus the
manufacturer, the demands for the sorts of things I've
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described. And in our particular case, with a very
aggressive indust~ry, with brands fighting each other all
of the time, it's a normal economic law of supply and
demand. There's a limited amount of space that you can
buy and the price has gone up, as you.., as you have
pointed out.
Me IRVING:
Q - Now, Mr. Hoult, we have looked at a sort of general
allocation of funds over a three (3) year period in the
strategic plan, we have looked at the overall amounts
you've been spending. I'd like now to come to the
process by which an actual advertising budget gets put
together within your company. Where does it start?
A - The evaluation of the market is an ongoing process and
that comes together, as I pointed out, in the strategic
plan. And in the course of putting together a strategic
plan, there are all sorts of people in the company who
are making cases for priorities, spending and so forth.
In a company like ours, which I described as a
market-driven company, these demands are-coming from
below by, essentially, the brand management group.
These are -- there's a group of professionals, each of
whom is responsible for a brand.
Now, a professional has the responsibility of
monitoring and evaluating the competitive brands to his
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own brand all of the time, and that is the basis, the
beginning of the.budgeting~process, the recommendations
from brand management groups.
Okay. So just to take an example, Mr. Hoult, you've
mentioned the brand Export. So is there a brand manager
for Export...
Yes.
... in the company?
Yes.
And would there be a brand manager then for each of the
other major brands as well?
For all the major brand family, certainly. Some of the
smaller ones would be combined. There would be a brand
manager looking after three (3) or four (4) minor
brands. But the major brands, yes.
So let's -- starting with the brand manager and looking
at the creation of an overall advertising budget, what
is his role?
Well, as I said, the preliminary role -- not the prime
role --.but the preliminary role is to be.absolutely
fully informed at all times of the current performance
of his or her brands, the potential, is the growing
brand steady, declining, and equally importantly, at all
times knowing what the competitive situation is for the
competitive brand that's fighting that particular brand
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in the marketplace. With this ongoing knowledge and
information, he or. she would be .essentially responsible
for putting forward a proposal to the next layer of
management to obtain the resources and funds to attain a
certain goal, which that person would commit to: "Give
me so much and I will deliver you so much in terms of
share or volume."
THE COURT:
Q - Okay. He makes his proposal to who?
A - Well, normally the brand manager would be making his
proposal, at this time of the year, for the strategic
plan, to the Marketing Vice-President, I think. The
Marketing Vice-President would put together all of these
individual plans and he or she would then make a very
formal market plan submission to me, as I was, as the
C.E.O. And I would be evaluating their recommendations,
testing their commitments and ultimately one of my major
responsibilities as the C.E.O. was to determine how
resources should be allocated.
Me IRVING:
Q - Okay. Now, I'd like to come back to the brand manager
for a moment, because you said that one of the brand
manager's responsibilities was to look at the
competition. And what is the brand manager looking at,
Mr. Hoult?
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A m
Firstly, he or she is looking at performance on a very
frequent basis,.and the Neilsen performance .that I have
referred to earlier which indicates for every brand in
the market what its consumer offtake is, what its
distribution is, whether it's growing and so forth, are
of prime -- prime importance.
Secondly, it's an evaluation of activity and this
activity comes back to us or to him or her in the head
office from all sorts of sources, two (2) of the most
important sources being market research, which would be
commissioned on a, for a major brand, almost on an
ongoing basis, and secondly from our sales force which
we regard as our first line of intelligence in terms of
what is happening in the marketplace.
Now, I'd like to go back just for a moment to Tab 1 in
the book, My Lord, page twenty-one (21). It is entitled
"Market Spending by Brand", and going down the left-hand
column, there are your brands, Export, third family
Vantage and so on, and underneath that I see Player's,
Du Maurier,~Matin~e and-then. "Total, Imperial Tobacco".
And then moving along to the right, there are some
numbers under the heading "Measured Media Expenditure".
What are these figures that you have here for, say
Player's?
Measured media is really an expression, a literal
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expression of what it is. It's the media exposure that
you can measure.. And all advertising agencies, at least
ours, have a service whereby they are monitoring at all
times what individual brands are spending and what
particular exposures they have. So that's a very
reliable measure. It's published data, also, which the
advertising agencies have access to and you can very
easily calculate, from where they are appearing, what
they can spend, because the costs of what they do are in
the public demand. They're...
So when I...
They're public costs.
When I look along the line for Player's, am I seeing
what your estimate is of what Player's has been
spending?
Yes.
For advertising?
That is advertising as on billboards, magazines,
newspapers. That would not include areas that couldn't
be measured, with the same degree of .accuracy, like
in-store activity.
Okay.
Or sponsorships, that would not be included in those
figures.
All right. So there's one column, "Major Media
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