SALEM - filter tip 85mm in 1959 - in the mid-fifties the popularity of filters, the long term association of menthol with a cool refreshing taste and the growing popularity of KOOL a non-filtered mentholated cigarette (mentholated cigarettes - mainly Kool - represented three percent of all cigarette sales in 1956) prompted the introduction of SALEM - the first menthol filter cigarette in May 1956 -- by RJ Reynolds; national distribution of SALEM was obtained a month later.

SALEM wasn't just a menthol version of Winston. It was a different blend with more Burley than Winston and less menthol than KOOL.. The available research indicated that RJ Reynolds realized Kool was unable to gain non-menthol smokers because the menthol level was too high. As a result, Kool was an occasional brand and most of its business was part-time usage.

Occasional (Speciality) Brand - the use of mentholated cigarettes was initially promoted to offer an alternative to the heavy, harsh-tasting experience of some non-mentholated products. The trend was to offer mentholated cigarettes as a change-of-pace product, particularly as a "refreshment" cigarette during the winter months when lowered indoor humidity was thought to contribute to dry throats.

Manny Yellen, in 1964 then Vice President of Sales and Advertsing for P. Lorrilard when commenting on the menthol market indicated that Kool had a therapeutic image. Most of Kool's sales volume was done during the winter months, except in the "hot-dry" areas of the country where its sales held regularly throughout the year.

From a document prepared for the Chicago Tribune in 1952 on the the role and function of cigarettes it was found Kool cigarettes had a highly specific reputation. The document indicated that Kool was more of a medicine than a cigarette. Some people smoked them all the time, but they were most consistently and definitely thought of as something to change to when one has a cold, a very bad cough or a dulled palate. In a sense, they provided a way of giving up smoking without actually stopping.

Willie - the penguin..

When at the doctor ask for a Kool???

Salem's advertising positioned the brand as "a new idea in smoking" which had a "rich tobacco taste with menthol fresh comfort." According to company records, the product was heavily laiden with Burley tobacco but only slightly flavored with menthol so the tobacco taste would not be masked. As can be seen below SALEM's tar delivery was then higher than Kool's at the same time its menthol level was lower.

Amounts in milligrams

Its advertising was keyed to light, refreshing spring time smoking. Refreshing as all outdoors was the slogan. The packs were green and RJ Reynolds pushed the brand in magazines rather than on radio because 'we wanted people to see the SALEM theme' - Grey said (not Bowman Grey I don't think).

SALEM's introduction was set for January 1957. To help SALEM out in the crowd RJ Reynolds wanted to sell the brand in a hard pack. The launch date and box were scrapped when Reynolds' executives learned that Philip Morris was getting ready to sell a menthol filter completely re-worked from an existing brand called SPUD that had limped along with little success since 1944. Reynolds went into overdrive to rush SALEM out ahead of Philip Morris. RJ Reynolds' Bill Smith, asst sales mgr. - "We didn't have the equipment for box manufacturing - we decided to go with the soft pack. The packaging material arrived on Saturday morning and the first SALEM's were rolling out of the packing room within 24 hours." Reynolds introduced SALEM on April 30, 1956. It went national one week later. And the reaction was phenomenal because the only menthol brand then, was KOOL but SALEM had a much lighter menthol taste and more tobacco taste and it took off like a jet. Within a year SALEM had caught KOOL. By 1960 RJ Reynolds was selling 35 billion (from 4 billion in 1956) SALEM and the brand had 7.5% of the market. (By 1960 - SALEM had tripled KOOL's rising sales and was largely responsible for the menthols' 11% share of the cigarette market. ) SALEM had taken the menthol taste from being a small speciality brand to a large successful product category.

But even a SALEM ad in 1973 brought out the speciality role for menthol. The text - "When the weather takes a turn for the worse, your cigarette can give you a scratchy throat. If it does, turn to SALEM. SALEM's natural menthol blend tastes naturally smooth. Not harsh. Not hot. Weather or Not!"

Salem grew almost exclusively by attracting non-menthol smokers. It also did well among younger adult smokers during its growth and stable years.

It would take 12 years for KOOL to catch up to Salem. Contributing to the decreased popularity of SALEM was a change in product delivery. To maintain the loyalty of its customer base SALEM slowly evolved into a product which had a great deal of menthol taste relative to tobacco taste. The shift to greater menthol taste probably reduced SALEM's appeal to new smokers and younger adult-non-menthol switchers.

The shift to filter cigarettes drove a change in advertising smoking ads no longer emphasized glamour. Instead advertising was all about safety and enjoyment. Men in business suits were replaced with couple smoking while enjoying a Sunday drive or an outing next to a lake or river. SALEM was perfect for the time - the Espy agency came up with another hummable winner 'You can take SALEM out of the country but you can't take the country out of SALEM.'

(RJ Reynolds - in the full flush of its success with Winston, launched its companion brand, SALEM - the first filter-tip menthol. It had the same size, format and packaging look as Winston but instead of the red banding SALEM was done up in a chilly blue-green to suggest its taste. Soon after its release SALEM introduced high-porosity paper that its copywriters said "breathes new mildness into the smoke..new freshness into the flavor.")

During the 1980s SALEM cigarettes became more youth-oriented. Whereas the dominant theme was "clean fresh country air," during the 1980s SALEM ads were populated by muscular surfers, beach bunnies, fun-loving party animals and other attractive adolescent role models.

In about 1963 - Bill Smith (the RJ Reynolds assistant sales manager) attended a sales management conference at Ohio State. The lecturer was Art Cullman, a marketing professor at Ohio Sate and shared the story of SALEM's introduction as a classic example of the importance of timing in the consumer - product business. (Art Pullman knew something about the tobacco business. His brother Joseph Cullman III was president of Philip Morris when SPUD menthol had fizzled under the direct fire from RJ Reynolds. (Domestic sales of SPUD were discontinued in 1963.)

With the invasion of SALEM, Brown &Williamson immediately placed a filter on its regular size KOOL and put it on the market later in 1956. Although B&W had good success with its regular (non-filter) KOOL menthol it apparently had been uncertain as to the strength and direction of the filter trend versus the non-filter king size trend for cigarettes. As a result it offered a king size version of its popular regular sized KOOL menthol brand in 1953 instead of a filtered version.

Other entries into the mentholated king filters included Lorillard's NEWPORT (May) and Liggett & Myers OASIS in 1957 and in 1959 Lorillard's released SPRING (July), Philip Morris's ALPINE and American Tobacco came out with Riviera.

By the end of 1958 mentholated brands accounted for about one of every six filter cigarettes and one of very 12 cigarettes of all types.

In 1960 Brown & Williamson added BELAIR, despite the fact that KOOL filter was doing well. By 1962 king menthol filters had risen to 15% of the cigarette market. American Tobacco Company in May 1964 released MONTCLAIR - this was what amounted to a mentholated version of CARLTON, which had an "air-vent" filter that was to further cool the smoke. Robert B. Walker (because president of American Tobacco in 1963) hoped MONTCLAIR would take some of the play away from Salem and Kool but this brand failed to gain more than a modest foothold. It's interesting to note that MONTCLAIR had the menthol placed in the filter and not mixed in with the tobacco.

SPRING (the air-conditioned cigarette) - added to Brown & Williamson's arsenal even though it would compete with NEWPORT. This cigarette featured a Lorillard first - a Lorillard developed cigarette paper - "electronically treated to create uniform ventilation over the surface of the cigarette via hundreds of microscopic openings which take in fresh air and allow heat (but not smoke or flavor) to escape." SPRING (contained a "wisp of menthol" for a cool, light taste) presented in a white soft pack, banded with blue and green stripes, also featured a special blend of tobaccos and a new "honeycomb" filter composed of a maze-like fiber network providing a myriad of filtering smoke baffles.

NEWPORT - filter tip 80 and 85mm in 1959 (Lorillard) - Probably where the NEWPORT cigarette got its name - Newport Jazz Festival - held annually from 1954 - one of the oldest jazz festivals organized in Newport, RI by Louis Lorillard and Elaine Lorillard who administered it through a non-profit corporation. According to Lorillard, NEWPORT had an imaginative hint of mint that swept to an immediate success among smokers who wanted only a touch of menthol with more tobacco taste than offered by other mentholated brands, thus enlarging the so-called "menthol" market.

Click here: For Lots of Information on the Growth of Newports

ALPINE - Philip Morris brought out ALPINE in 1959 to replace its old SPUD menthol that was then discontinued nationally in 1963. The packaging mimicked the Marlboro design, only in green instead of red and with a snowy mountain peak instead of the peaked roof. ALPINE began promisingly but quickly turned to a me-too brand, and the company, did not have the cash to spare to sustain yet another major marketing effort.

Since 1962, mentholated counterparts (line-extensions, hitchhiking) of brand release have been taken for granted. In almost every case, when a new brand is currently released, there is a mentholated version developed and released as well to capture that segment of the smokers which prefer this taste mixed with its tobacco.

See list of the 1294 domestic cigarettes available in 1998. May take a few seconds to be displayed.

The three largest menthol brands through the 1970s and on into the 1990s were SALEM, KOOL and NEWPORT. In the early 70s KOOL passed SALEM as the brand leader. This lasted approximately 10 years mainly because Kool changed the character in 1975 going from the fastest growing brand to the fastest declining brand.- See addition info in the Newport module.. - place branch here.. RJ Reynolds' SALEM than recaptured its position as the leader.

Lorillard's NEWPORT passed Brown & Williamson's KOOL in 1991 and in 1993 NEWPORT passed SALEM to become the top selling menthol brand. Philip Morris never sustained a freestanding entry in the menthol sector, picking up scraps instead in the form of line extensions of its main brands, e.g., Marlboro menthols. .

African Americans and the Tobacco Industry. A recent paper examines key social factors that when taken together conspired to create the demand for menthol cigarettes in the African American community. Adobe PDF download may take a few seconds

Graphs of Domestic Market Share and Volume Sales of Major Brands

Two graphs follow - 1. Domestic Market Share of Menthol Cigarettes from 1954 to 1995 and 2. Unit Volume Comparisons of the Major Menthol Cigarettes from 1950 to 1999..

View a Table of menthol cigarette sales and market share from 1925 to 1993.

SALEM is the world's largest selling menthol cigarette and is particularly strong in the Far East markets. Reynolds International - now international operations owned by Japanese. In the RJ Reynolds Nabisco 1997 Annual Report - "The company's SALEM brand continues to be the world's leading menthol cigarette and opportunities exist to capitalize on Salem's leadership in the menthol category in Asia and elsewhere."

References:

Garten, S, Pharmacological Effects of Menthol and its Association with Indicators of Nicotine Dependence, Master's Thesis, May 24, 2001.

Heimann RK, Tobacco & Americans, McGraw- Hill Book Company, Inc., 1960.

Kluger R, Ashes to Ashes, Vintage Books, New York, 1997.

Lewine H, Good-Bye To All That, McGraw-Hill, 1970.

Lorillard and Tobacco 200^th Anniversary, P. Lorillard Company 1760-1960, 1960.

Reid JR, A History of Mentholated Cigarettes "This Spud's For You", Recent Adv Tob Sci 19: 71-84, 1993.

RJ Reynolds Our 100^th Anniversary, 1875-1975, RJ Reynolds Industries, Inc., 1975.

Sobel R, They Satisfy - The Cigarette in American Life, Anchor Books, 1978.

Social Research, Inc., Cigarettes Their Role and Function for the Chicago Tribune, April 30, 1952.

"Sold Americans!" - The First Fifty Years 1904-1954, The American Tobacco Company, 1954.

Tobacco Documents: P. Lorillard 94307905/925, 1994; 01124257/263, 1964; 03308276, 1972.

RJ Reynolds: 50565 6289/6303, 1986; 50309 8909/8918, 50564 3289, 1985; 50009 4451; 50179 7442/7464.

Copyright notice:
None of the content of this website can be copied (or used) without permission of the Author.