It is time
for the second blog post in which I will discuss a famous cigarette brand.
Cigarettes started to become popular in the end of 19th century,
they were far different from the ones we know today. There was no filter, the
tobacco was very harsh, but people were still smoking them. Most of the people
didn’t actually inhale the smoke and used cigarettes just like pipes, cigars
etc. An evidence for that is the advertising campaign of Lucky Strike in the
1930s, Lucky Strike is asking customers “Do you inhale?” That might be strange
for people nowadays, but with the time things changed and cigarette tobacco
became milder which made inhaling more acceptable. The brand that I will tell
you about today has also changed with the years adjusting to the changes in our
world. The brand is called “Camel”.
CAMEL
History:
Camel is a
brand that was presented by an American company R.J.Reynolds Tobacco in 1913.
Camel was an innovation because it was giving the customers packaged
cigarettes. Most of the people who smoked back then used to roll their own
cigarettes and there was no national market for pre-packaged cigarettes.
Reynolds wanted to get a flavor that would be more appealing than any other
tobacco products, he created the Camel cigarette, it was named like that
because it used Turkish paper. Reynolds won over the competition by cutting the
price of Camel down, within a year, Camel had sold 425 million packs of
cigarettes. This way Camel became successful and continued with full force.
Recently in the last ten years Camel is not the most preferred choice by
customers, but it still stays one of the most famous cigarette brands.
Facts:
-
Most
current Camel cigarettes contain a mix of Turkish and Virgina tobacco.
-
Winston-Salem,
North Carolina, the city where R.J.Reynolds was founded, is nicknamed “Camel
City” because of the brand’s popularity.
-
The most famous historical style of Camel
cigarettes is the soft pack of the regular, unfiltered variety (generally known
as Camel Straights or Regulars).
-
Camel
regulars got popular with the help of famous people such as the news
broadcaster Edward R.Murrow, who used to smoke up to 80 cigarettes per day, in
effect using a Camel cigarette as his trademark.
-
In
the late 1980s RJR created “Joe Camel” as the mascot of the brand, few years
later the American Medical Association published a report which stated that
five and six year old kids could more easily recognise Joe Camel than: Mickey
Mouse, Fred Flintstone, Bugs Bunny or Barbie.
What does Camel do to make people buy the product?
Camel has a long history in the tobacco industry and it has been very
successful. The first thing that Camel did was to be innovative and different
than the other companies back then. Second thing as I said is that the brand
lowered the prices of Camel cigarettes which made a lot of people buy them.
Afterwards Camel got better budget and made the quality of the tobacco better,
customers appreciated that and kept buying Camel.
The advertising brilliance of Camel: Camel were made to have a milder
taste than the other brands, which at that time were considered much harsher.
Camel was advance-promoting, before the actual release, the brand launched an
advertising campaign that included “teasers” which stated “The Camels Are
Coming”(a play on the old Scottish folk song, “The Campbells Are Coming”).
Another promotion strategy was the use of a Circus camel called “Old Joe”, it
was driven trough town and used to distribute free cigarettes to people. The
slogan of Camel back then was “I’d walk a mile for a Camel!” It is clear that
the brand knew how to promote back then and it did it very well. All that
clever campaigns helped massively for the popularity and the success of the
brand.
The PR of the brand. The sponsorship was a wide variety of motorsport
brands such as: Lotus Formula One team, Benetton Formula One team, Williams
Formula One team, Honda, many cup races in NASCAR, Yamaha at Grand Prix etc.
The strange sponsorship they did was the 1986 FIFA World Cup, football and
cigarettes I don’t think they go hand by hand.
One of their Sales Promotions stands out: it was called “Camel Cash” or
“C-Note” which was equal to five American cents, the note was stuck to the back
of the Camel package. People were gathering this Camel Cash and after having
enough they could exchange the “Cash” for items from the Camel Cash catalogue.
It changed a lot over the years, at some point in the past it included the face
of Joe Camel, the same way as presidents are featured on American currency.
This very smart sales promotion finished ten years ago on the 31st
of March, 2007.
Conclusion
Overall Camel is one of the best known tobacco brands in the world
because of the way it was promoted, because of the way it was made, and because
of the way it was sold. Although not very popular in the UK it is still very
popular in the rest of Europe and in the USA. There are no more promotional
activities allowed, so it will be interesting to see if Camel will go down or
it will stay up.
If you are a smoker, after reading this posts, I am sure you want to
have a cigarette, so go and have one. Doesn’t matter if you smoke or not look
out for my next post in which we will be discussing alcohol again.
