Marlboro Consumer Behavior
Introduction
It seems to be a romantic story behind every famous brand, which has been widely
circulated. Just like Marlboro is silently recounting his history with the following sentence-
Man Always Remember Love Because Of Romance Only. Marlboro is the largest selling
brand of cigarettes, which was made by Philip Morris USA within the US, and by Philip
Morris International outside the US (Wikipedia, 2013). Also in the global consumers’
hearts, Marlboro is undoubtedly the most famous international brand. However, in the
early time of Marlboro, it was marketed to the women, which was match to the slogan
“Mild as May”. But things go athwart, though there were a growing number of people
smoking in USA, the sales of Marlboro cigarettes were flat. In 1954, a famous advertising
man, Leo Burnett, was given a task to enable Marlboro appealing to men. Finally, he
completely changed the fate of Marlboro, which made Marlboro’s market share rose from
less than one percent to the fourth best-selling brand (Wikipedia, 2013). By now, Marlboro
is selling well in 160 countries in the last 50 years and it is the top no.1 cigarette brand all
over the world.
As it is known, China is the world’s largest consumer of tobacco and there are more than
350 million Chinese smokers and China produces 42% of the world’s cigarettes (Peter,
2006).However, Marlboro does not perform well in China, it has less than 1% market
share in the country. In this situation, Marlboro created new kinds of cigarette whose tastes
are relevant to Chinese culture, like red Marlboro. In addition, young adults have also been
taken into consideration, which is the new target of Chinese consumers. Compared to
Chinese market, United Kingdom plays an important role in the market share but there are
decreasing number of British people tending to quit. Thus, Marlboro changed their
packaging in order to make a progress in the market share. Also they made the strategy of
focusing on the young adults for extent sales. In the second part, consumer identity is
targeted at young adult in German Marlboro market which shows that Marlboro did a lot
of activities such as billboard, advertisement, film in cinema, and so on. However, at the
same time, Marlboro encountered an amount of problems like the boycott of some health
centers and the restrictions from the government.
Culture
As a population of more than 1.3 billion people where more than 32% of adults smoke,
