Rothmans sees market share slip
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors contributing to the historic loss of market share experienced by Rothmans Benson & Hedges (RBH), Canada's second largest tobacco firm. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a case study of the marketing of RBH flagship cigarette brand Rothmans between 1957 and 2000, comparing its performance with brands owned by market leader Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd (ITL). Findings Sometimes it is no fun at all being a marketer. You have a generous advertising budget, follow the rules of strategic brand management, make sure your brand communications are consistent with the historical brand identity – and yet your market share declines. Take the case of RBH – historically Canada's second‐largest seller of cigarettes – which saw its market share slide from 43 percent in 1975 to a mere 17 percent by the mid‐1990s. It does not help of course if the government decides to introduce regulations restricting where and how you can advertise, but other tobacco firms seemed to adapt more successfully, gaining ground in key consumer segments. What went wrong for Rothmans? Practical implications The paper highlights the importance of contemporary references and imagery in enabling a brand to keep pace with changes in the target market. Social implications The paper shows how legislation intended to restrict product advertising can have unintended consequences as firms use creative marketing to exploit loopholes in regulation. Originality/value The paper draws on internal corporate documents made public through tobacco industry legal challenges to Canada's Tobacco Products Control Act (TPCA), in addition to trade press and promotional material.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".