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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.