Lights Cigarettes in the USA

Executive Summary

Taste Trade-Off

When asked about their motivations for smoking, cigarette consumers everywhere in the world always provide many and different reasons to smoke. Nevertheless one that seems to be critical for consumers is the smoking pleasure that they enjoy. This is an element that consumers are not willing to give up at all. Instead they are only willing to trade off taste by compensation in other elements.

This trade-off has been of major importance for the development of the Lights segment in the USA, where consumers showed a strong interest in trying brands with lighter (milder or smoother) taste but embraced only those brands that provided adequate taste. The role of tar in a cigarette's taste created a dichotomy between decreasing tar and maintaining taste.

The market reaction to the introduction of filter, menthol and low tar cigarettes is evidence of this consumer behavior. One of the reasons that the Lights segment did not develop fully in the '50s, when Kent Micronite 7 mg. was launched, was that consumers perceived Kent tasteless and hard to draw. In a market where tar deliveries ranged between the low 20 milligrams and the high 30 milligrams and the sales-weighted average tar (SWAT) was about 35 mg., the tar delivery gap between Kent and the market was too high for the consumers to handle. Consumers did not have incentives to trade off the stronger taste and smoking satisfaction they found in Full Flavour cigarettes mainly because they were not sensitized toward tar deliveries at that time.

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