Filters' Friend
Marketing strategy must be guided not by what the consumer wants today but what he probably will want three, four or even five years from now." Putting his precept into practice when he took over P. Lorillard Co. 2½years ago, Chairman Lewis Gruber, 63, rescued his aged (founded 1760), slipping company by gambling heavily on smokers' future desires. He changed the filter and blend of Kent cigarettes to cut down tar and nicotine and -as he says in the kind of phrase that sounds snappy around a boardroom table -give smokers "less of the things they have been smoking filters to get less of." Result, in the statistics that look wonderful on a boardroom chart: Kent's domestic sales zipped from 3.4 billion to 36 billion a year; Lorillard's stock went from 15⅛ to 89; Lorillard sales jumped from $203 million to close to $480 million in 1958; net income rose from $4,519,758 to an estimated $28.5 million; and Lorillard moved from a lagging sixth among companies to nudge Liggett & Myers for the No. 3 spot in U.S. tobacco sales.
Gruber now sniffs a new trend. Last week Lorillard began test-marketing a cork-tipped, cigarette-sized cigar in a flip-top box. Price: 35¢ for a pack of 20.
Lewis Gruber is a crack salesman whose single, all-consuming passion is tobacco. There is little else he can talk about, little else that interests him. When dining in Manhattan restaurants, he passes out Kents to neighboring tables. At poker and pinochle (he is an indifferent player), he shuffles out samples of new cigarette blends for informal taste polls. His other pleasures are simple, though his tastes are rich. He dresses expensively, favors dark blue suits and blue or grey silk ties that blend well with his heavy-lidded, blue-grey eyes, tans his skin under a sun lamp, plays up his graceful hands by wearing transparent nail polish, a star sapphire ring, a thick gold watchband, huge cuff links.