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Most tobaccomen feel that filters—which were once expected to gobble up 75% of the market—have about reached their peak. Everyone who was going to be scared by the cancer talk has already been scared, they say. Have filters about worn out their basic sales appeal? One clue is front-running, unfiltered Camels. Their sales fell steadily for six years; then last year, Camel sales turned around, rose 3%. Another clue is the decision of some manufacturers to loosen or lighten their filters to let more teste through. Last week Liggett & Myers announced that it is redesigning its new filtered Duke because "most people don't like that heavy a filter." These changes come at a time when the Federal Trade Commission has just persuaded the industry to give up voluntarily all health-protection claims for cigarettes, recently their loudest selling pitch. One reason for the industry's willingness: it was beginning to think that it had already got as much mileage as possible out of filter claims. From now on, it is going back to wooing its customers with the old-fashioned lures of flavor, aroma and satisfaction.
Pushing Pleasure. No one could be more pleased by this switch than a freckle-faced, sandy-haired North Carolinian named Bowman Gray, chairman of Winston-Salem's R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., the nation's No. 1 tobacco company.
Reynolds and Bowman Gray, 53, have been stressing taste all along because, says Gray, "people smoke for fun and the simple pleasure of it." Except for occasional flirtations with throat therapy, e.g., in its T-zone ads of the 19405, the company has largely steered away from the health issue. When the cancer controversy started, it was Bowman Gray, then Reynolds' advertising chief, who concluded that the wisest course was to stick with the theme of taste instead of test tubes, to push flavor before filtration.
Gray knows well that it is the tar and nicotine that add to a cigarette's flavor, and that when they are reduced, smoking pleasure is also reduced. Therefore, Reynolds' cigarettes have always ranked high in tar and nicotine—and flavor.
Pushing smoking pleasure has proved a bonanza for Reynolds. In 1958, for the first time in 18 years, it edged ahead of front-running American Tobacco, last year increased its lead to pile up record sales of $1.3 billion and profits of $90.4 million. Its regular-sized Camels are the No. 1 U.S. cigarette (since 1949). Its Winstons are the biggest-selling filter tip (since 1955) and the third most popular U.S. cigarette, its filtered Salems the top U.S. menthol. Reynolds also makes Prince Albert, the leading U.S. pipe tobacco, and Days Work, the top chewing tobacco. Its profit margin is 12.5% higher than any other in the industry, and its stock, selling last week at 62¼, is considered the bluest of the blue-chip tobacco stocks.
Golden Tongue. To pick its mixtures, Reynolds relies on a tasting panel of 250 employees (from top executives to stenographers) who regularly test its new products. But Gray—who began smoking when he was nine—is the man with the golden tongue, gives the final O.K.