uk bat.com - Marketing

Marketing

We invest in positioning our brands appropriately for adults who've decided they do want to buy tobacco

Successful marketing is the bedrock of growth for any fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) business and we are no exception.

But when we talk about growth, there’s a big point to make clear.  By growth, we don’t mean ‘selling smoking’ to boost the number of people in the world who smoke or the amount they smoke.  We mean growing our share – more specifically, the value of our share – of the large number of adults who choose to be tobacco consumers.

Ours is a mature market – one where everyone already knows what tobacco is.  There would be no commercial sense in trying to promote tobacco products to people who know what they are and have decided they don’t want them.

We invest in positioning our high quality brands competitively for the adults who’ve decided they do want to buy tobacco.  And we’ve shown that through focus, intelligence, responsiveness and a high priority on responsibility, we can successfully build the brand loyalty of adults who have chosen to be tobacco consumers and win consumers away from competitor brands.

A billion adults worldwide choose to consume tobacco.  Our aim is not just to maximise our share of sales – value and quality are high on our agenda.  We aim to keep adding value for our consumers, trade customers and shareholders through an approach we call ‘win-win-win’.  This means giving our consumers premium value through premium quality and unique, differentiated brands, enabling our trade customers to benefit from premium margins and, by satisfying both consumers and trade customers, delivering long term sustainable value for our shareholders.

Global drive brands

Our global drive brands - Kent, Dunhill, Lucky Strike and Pall Mall - are at the forefront of our innovations, product refinements and trade engagement, with each brand differentiated and given a special focus within our ‘win-win-win’ approach.  We aim to grow our drive brands by high single digits a year over the medium to long term and continue increasing the large proportion of value they contribute to our global brand portfolio. In 2012, our international brands as a whole accounted for one in three of the cigarettes we sell.

The strong performance of our drive brands so far suggests that consumers and trade customers think we’re getting it right.  Over recent years, we’ve grown our global drive brands significantly - while at the same time obeying strict laws on tobacco marketing and adopting tight voluntary marketing standards of our own, that in several countries go beyond the law.

Growth of our global drive brands (billions of cigarettes sold)

What we don’t do

Strict laws in many countries, and our voluntary International Marketing Principles, mean there are many things we don’t do in marketing.

Top of the list is that we don’t market to the under-age. We don’t do ‘product placement’ in films, plays or TV programmes, or link our product brands to celebrities or to sporting, professional, social or sexual success. All our consumer packaging carries a clearly visible health warning, even where the law doesn’t require it.

What we do do

Given the restrictions - including the tight restrictions we set for ourselves - people often ask us how we do deliver such strong brand growth.

The answer is simple, though it takes hard work and skill to achieve. We have developed approaches that we believe are appropriate for modern marketing of our challenging product, and pursue excellence in everything we do.

We believe that accepting and implementing tighter marketing restrictions for a risky and controversial product is not only the right thing to do, but that it has helped us to bring focus and discipline to the marketing we can do, by removing distractions and enabling us to build our skills in the right marketing fundamentals.

This new way of marketing has brought us back to where brand marketing started – with product information and differentiation offering the adult smoker real choice.

Find out more about our approach to the '5 marketing Ps' for tobacco product brands in Modern tobacco marketing.

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