TRACKING The marketing strategy for India relies heavily on kiosk advertising and social events Health officials fume at Philip Morris’ ad policy
New Delhi, July 18: S.K. Arora spent more than three years trudging through the Indian summer heat and monsoon rains to inspect tobacco kiosks across this sprawling megacity, tearing down cigarette advertisements and handing out fines to store owners for putting them up.
But as fast as he removed the colorful ads, more appeared.
The chief tobacco control officer at the Delhi state government, Arora asked the major cigarette companies to put a stop to the catand-mouse routine. In official letters and face-to-face meetings, he told them India’s tobacco control laws barred such public advertising and promotion of cigarettes.
That included the Indian arm of Philip Morris International Inc, the world’s largest publicly traded tobacco company.
Early last year, Mr Arora said, he met with a Philip Morris director for corporate affairs in India, a man named R. Venkatesh, and told him the signs were an unequivocal violation of Indian law.
Like other tobacco companies, Philip Morris kept up its ad blitz.
Mr Venkatesh says Philip Morris is doing nothing wrong. In response to questions from Reuters, he said the company’s advertising is “compliant with Indian law” and that Philip Morris has “fully cooperated with the enforcement authorities” on the matter.
But Indian government officials say Philip Morris is using methods that flout the nation’s tobacco-control regulations. These include tobacco shop displays as well as the free distribution of Marlboro – the world’s best-selling cigarette brand – at nightclubs and bars frequented by young people.
In internal documents, Philip Morris International is explicit about targeting the country’s youth. A key goal is “winning the hearts and minds of LA24,” those between legal age, 18, and 24, according to one slide in a 2015 commercial review presentation.
As with the point-of-sale ads at kiosks, public health officials say that giving away cigarettes is a violation of India’s Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act and its accompanying rules.
Philip Morris’ marketing strategy for India, which relies heavily on kiosk advertising and social events, is laid out in hundreds of pages of internal documents reviewed by Reuters that cover the period from 2009 to 2016.
In them, Philip Morris presents these promotions as key marketing activities.
In recent years, they have helped to more than quadruple Marlboro’s market share in India, where the company is battling to expand its reach in the face of an entrenched local giant. Reuters is publishing a selection of those documents in a searchable repository, The Philip Morris Files.
The company’s goal is to make sure that “every adult Indian smoker should be able to buy Marlboro within walking distance,” according to another 2015 strategy document.
In targeting young adults, Philip Morris is deploying a strategy that it and other tobacco companies used in the US decades ago.
A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2002 found that during the 1990s, “tobacco industry sponsorship of bars and nightclubs increased dramatically, accompanied by cigarette brand paraphernalia, advertisements, and entertainment events in bars and clubs.”
With cigarette sales declining in many countries, Philip Morris has identified India as a market with opportunity for significant growth.
“India remains a high potential market with huge upside with cigarette market still in infancy,” says a 2014 internal document.
According to government data, India has about 100 million smokers. Of those, about two-thirds smoke traditional hand-rolled cigarettes. Tobacco use kills more than 900,000 people a year in India, and the WHO estimates that tobacco-related diseases cost the country about $16 billion annually. TRENDS