Reacting to Marlboro’s Genius Marketing – Reaction Time 009

Martin Henley
Hello there, my name is Martin Henley. This is the effective marketing YouTube channel. If you’ve been here for a second, you will know that I’m on a mission to support you to be successful in your business. Now, the only way I know that you can be more successful in your business is by being more successful with your sales and marketing. So not only am I here giving you everything I know about sales and marketing, I’m also putting in in what anyone I can find with experience of sales and marketing, to extract their knowledge and experience.

Martin Henley
I’m also bringing you the marketing news every other Wednesday. And we are also reacting to the best and the worst of marketing content on the internet, which is what is going on today. Now, you might think that this is a shameless ruse just to bring more great content to the channel, and you will be absolutely 100% right. But there is an element of Jeopardy going on here. So I’m not selecting what it is that I will be reviewing today. That job has already been done by Clay. And what is going to happen is we’re going to look at the links, and then we’re going to decide what it is or pick one of the links that Clay has decided is worthy of reaction.

Martin Henley
So if we go to the Clay’s lists, you can see there’s a list here or number six is already highlighted. So there are six here. And the universe seems to think a big good idea for me to react to number six, and let’s go with number six, and see what Clay has in store for us.
Okay, so starting Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, so this is interesting. It’s the genius marketing strategy of Marlboro cigarettes. Okay, so there might be no starting date of there might be a bit of a theme happening here. Because the last one was Coca Cola. So these are not very healthy brands, which are marketed brilliantly.

Martin Henley
Now I’ve got a views about smoking. My dad smoked for I think my dad smoked for more than 50 years. I smoked probably for more than 30 years. I quit again about 18 months ago. And I’m completely clean and very happy that I’m clean from smoking cigarettes. But I’ve got a theory about the way that cigarettes are marketed. So it will be interesting to see what they say. So this is only eight minutes. So let’s watch bits of the video and see what they have to say.

Martin Henley
Okay, let’s go.

Narrator
People on the historic date of 11th of January 1964. It was officially declared by the United States government. That cigarette causes cancer. And within a day and $8 billion tobacco industry and the incomes of 750,000 families was at stake. While most companies saw their sales dropping down. There was one company that miraculously went from having just one person market share to becoming the fourth largest cigarette brand in the world in less than one year. Then after 1970, even cigarette advertisements were permanently banned from televisions, this brand became even more popular to go on to become the largest manufacturer of cigarettes in the world.

Narrator
This brand that I’m talking about goes by the name Marlboro. And Marlboro today is so huge, that it has got more consumers than its next 10 competitors combined. The question is, what the hell did they do because always the very same cancer report and the ban, which is essentially supposed to kill its business ended up becoming a stepping stone for Marlboro to become a $58 billion brand.

Martin Henley
Wow. Okay, so good. So I didn’t know any of this. I mean, I knew obviously that cigarettes cause cancer. And I knew that obviously there was a reckoning. Or there was a point where the American government claimed, you know, came out and said cigarettes cause cancer, but I didn’t know that Marlboro only had 1% of the market at that time. I didn’t know that Marlboro was doing better than its next 10 competitors combined. I didn’t know that they only had 1% market share at that time. So there must have been some genius marketing strategy here. I’m interested to find out what it is. And I will share with you my theory whether it’s in this or otherwise, my theory is more about how tobacco is marketed, rather than how Marlboro do their marketing.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?