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In our series devoted to industrial failures, the Premier, the “smokeless cigarette” launched in 1988 by the American manufacturer RJ Reynolds. Fifteen years before the electronic cigarette, the promise was to create an alternative to the classic cigarette. But the public did not follow and nearly a billion dollars put on the table by the group to launch the product did indeed go up in smoke.
In the television news, a man, looking relaxed, smokes a cigarette. From his mouth, instead of thick smoke, a light cloud. This man is Dick Kampe, the director of development at RJ Reynolds. He comes to show the Premier cigarette, a product presented as revolutionary. ” It significantly reduces the controversial components found in conventional cigarettes. There is very little smoke, almost no ashes… »
Unlike a conventional cigarette, the Premier is lit by burning a piece of carbon which causes the tobacco to heat up rather than burn. Certainly, it makes less smoke, but there is a problem: the taste. ” It tasted like burnt tires, Brussels sprouts, even the smell of fart… »
Stacey Anderson is a doctor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of California: It’s not me who says it, it’s Penelope Cohen, of the Marketing department of RJ Reynolds, in internal documents. On top of that it wasn’t really smoke free. It did not answer the problem of social acceptance. Finally, the ritual of the cigarette was turned upside down. It didn’t stay on, you had to suck constantly, much more than normal. And in the end, the sales teams didn’t really prepare the public for what the product was really about. ».
A contradictory product in 1988
RJ Reynolds, at the time Premier was launched, had spent almost a billion dollars developing and marketing it. Was it done too quickly? Robert Proctor, science historian at the prestigious Stanford University, knows the practices of the tobacco industry like the back of his hand. He went through thousands and thousands of internal documents released to the public in 1998, the ” tobacco documents “. Ten years before that date, the historian reminds us, industrialists were already worried.
« By the end of the 1980s, the “conspiracy” of industrialists was in trouble. The public health community insisted on the lethal nature of cigarettes. There was also the threat of regulators. Remember, this is the end of the Reagan administration and its public health administrator, Charles Everett Koop, was staunchly anti-tobacco. He was convinced by the scientific arguments which demonstrated that passive smoking could cause cancer. So the industry was getting more and more worried that maybe this was the beginning of the end. »
At the time, in 1988, the industry did not yet recognize that cigarettes had any health effects. No question of abandoning the good old cigarette. And there’s no question of selling Premier as a safer product either. A contradiction enlightened by Robert Proctor.
« When they invented Premier, they were caught in their own game. They couldn’t say it was safer. That would imply that all the others are not. They couldn’t just say “it’s cleaner” or “it removes some controversial compounds.” They were beating around the bush. And this is also one of the reasons for its commercial failure. We never managed to convince consumers to buy it. We never told them “Listen, regular cigarettes get you addicted for life with a high chance of dying from cancer, these are safer.” They couldn’t do it. Well, they didn’t say it anyway. »
Finally, Premier will remain on the American market for less than a year. A few years later, the RJ Reynolds group launched Eclipse, an almost similar product but with a better taste and the support of scientists paid to boast of the slightest toxicity and thus maintain doubt. A miserable failure, the Premier paved the way for many products sold as alternatives to cigarettes. The electronic cigarette, today, is the latest avatar.