Swedish Match pushes into the US market this summer...two new varieties

[Hanske]

I'm no fan of General, but at least it's(the original product) real snus. I have a couple problems with their campaign. First is the dilution of the General brand. There shouldn't be any mint, wintergreen, creamy doucheberry, or anything else that isn't General lös, original portion, or (begrudgingly)white portion. General is spicy bergamot. AFAIC, anything that isn't spicy bergamot isn't General.

Those General flavours is just SM attempt to fit in the American market. In Norway and Sweden, only General Løs, GES løs, General Portion, GES portion etc. is available. Only the standard stuff, not all those weird flavours.

[chadizzy1]

Which is probably the only reason I get to drink Stella...I remember right after that merger, I saw Boddingtons hit my grocery store shelves for the first time...yum yum...

I love Stella. It's my favorite beer.

[Mawdryn]

I love Stella. It's my favorite beer.

He's not only "Snus Ambassador to the World", but also a man of taste...

[Nate5700]

I have no interest in snus as a smoking alternative. Snus is it's own product, and if people find a use in that to quit smoking, then great, but I don't want to see it setup as some kind of new Nicorette. Snus has a long and honorable history as quality tobacco product, and I want to see it sold on those terms.

Why can't it be both? In fact, I think that's why it can be successful at getting people to stop smoking when Nicorette has clearly failed, because it is a quality product with an honorable history. But even quality products have to adapt to the marketplace.

Let me put it this way: The first time I really drank, it was not a nice Scotch. I drank from a keg of Key Light at a college party. I wasn't interested in Scotch. But as I drank more and my tastes changed, I became interested in European and craft beers, real beer. I've even had Scotch a couple of times and enjoyed it. But 19-year-old college me wasn't ready for it.

People need to understand and accept snus as a format for tobacco consumption. Once they do, the marketplace will open up to the refined, traditional products. And if people enjoy the Americanized product, is that so bad? Guinness is great, but that doesn't mean a Miller Light can't taste good from time to time.

[Darwin]

I'm sure everyone has noticed that these new cans appear designed to "accidentally" fit just fine into a Camel cooler. I'm not sure why the Gen. would do this since I am sure that any RJR rep would have an aneurysm if he ever saw that a retailer had mixed General in with the Camel crud. Doubtless much red-faced legal yelling and hysterical tort threats would ensue from RJR's army of tame shysters. Couldn't blame the bums much though. The comparison would be extremely embarrassing for the benighted hump-backed brand.

Could be that SM wants to source coolers from the same vendor that RJR uses and will just slap their own placards on them.

[chadizzy1]

I'm sure everyone has noticed that these new cans appear designed to "accidentally" fit just fine into a Camel cooler. I'm not sure why the Gen. would do this since I am sure that any RJR rep would have an aneurysm if he ever saw that a retailer had mixed General in with the Camel crud. Doubtless much red-faced legal yelling and hysterical tort threats would ensue from RJR's army of tame shysters. Couldn't blame the bums much though. The comparison would be extremely embarrassing for the benighted hump-backed brand.

Could be that SM wants to source coolers from the same vendors that RJR uses and will just slap their own placards on them.

It begs the question if this new General is shelf stable or needs to be refrigerated.

[Mawdryn]

Could be that SM wants to source coolers from the same vendors that RJR uses and will just slap their own placards on them.

This sounds VERY likely to me...

[jagmanss]

It begs the question if this new General is shelf stable or needs to be refrigerated.

Well! According to Rick, General or any swedish snus for that matter does not need to be refrigerated as it's that Swedish Match brain washing and that pasteurized snus doesn't need to be refrigerated and will retain it's moisture for 4-6 months not refrigerated and will not go bad ( get dried out ) ( Loose flavor ) Etc , So shelf life here in the USA or in your home should not be an issue... It's all a fallacy and sales gimick that any snus needs to be stable by being refrigerated.... But it is a good Idea to keep it refrigerated or even freeze it if your not going to use it within 4-6 months.... All per Rick.... So it begs the question... Why are we all keeping our snus in the fridge If this is just a sales gimick? Hmmm have we all been brain wahed into beleiving our snus needs to be in the fridge?

[rllksxl]

I prefer my snus cold, but otherwise I don't think it matters much. I'd think snus would keep /best/ chilled, but room temperature is /good enough/. Chilling is probably more important for paperboard tins.

[Darwin]

It begs the question if this new General is shelf stable or needs to be refrigerated.

Shelf stable would the sane approach but predicting the corporate mind is a fraught exercise these days.

[Ephemeris]

I'm no fan of General, but at least it's(the original product) real snus. I have a couple problems with their campaign. First is the dilution of the General brand. There shouldn't be any mint, wintergreen, creamy doucheberry, or anything else that isn't General lös, original portion, or (begrudgingly)white portion. General is spicy bergamot. AFAIC, anything that isn't spicy bergamot isn't General.

People need to be educated, and told their preferred taste is dog shit. If scotch distillers asked Americans what scotch should taste like, it would taste like sour apple schnapps. Yet people still drink real scotch. Real beer has taken off over the last 20 years or so, but if you asked Americans 25 years ago what beer should taste like, you'd have gotten Miller Lite.

I'd stress the authenticity of real snus, and strongly imply that anything else isn't snus. I wouldn't mind seeing a Scandinavian snus council that dictated what snus was, and anything that didn't follow their narrow guidelines couldn't be called snus.

Good points all. Each of these issues were addressed by our side; they were all answered with a varying degree of satisfaction.

The focus of the new ad campaign was "Camel and Marlboro aren't real snus. General is the original. Be a man and come try real snus." We all applauded this direction, as it's getting away from the "original pursuit" campaign, which the Swedish Match guys freely admitted was a giant failure. Their new focus is to educate the public on what constitutes real snus, and even though this Americanized stuff isn't what we're used to per se, it's the first attempt at mass-marketing a real Swedish snus in this country along the lines of what RJR and PM are doing with their products.

They're going after the Taco Bell crowd with these blends, and hoping that once the public gets familiar with the General brand through their local c-store network, they'll hop online and investigate further and end up going to an upscale tobacconist and purchasing "real" General. They're making a very public statement in intentionally overpricing General over Camel in order to create an image of prestige, premium quality. They want Joe Public to think that Camel and Marlboro cost less because they're an inferior product, and it just wasn't clicking with the Round Can in the limited C-store network that it's available in right now.

Regarding the dilution of the brand with mint/wintergreen/candy products- I've always suspected this, and we were finally presented with concrete numbers. 73% of the moist snuff market in North America is mint/frost/wintergreen. This includes Camel and Marlboro snus. That means that three out of four smokefree tobacco users in America is buying a mint or wintergreen dip/snus. And the fourth guy? He's 88% likely to be using a Copenhagen product.

So even if Swedish Match only had lös, Original, and White portions in this country, the very best that they could hope to gain from this is if every single Copenhagen dipper in the country switched to General snus (yeah right). Even then, they would only control 1/4 of the smokeless market. They HAVE to market Wintergreen and Mint General products in this country; I mean, it's simply not an option. Sure, to "preserve" the General brand name/image, they could create a new brand just for the mint lines, but there's a million cons against that idea and maybe only one or two pros.

(Just to digress here- every single person that we met from Swedish Match NA used either General Mint or General Wintergreen. I don't think they "get" why we dig the genuine Swedish flavor profile. And quite honestly I believe this alienation translates down into their marketing campaigns and eagerness to tweak the flavors for American pallets.)

So, their new plan in a nutshell is to

1. Keep the Round Can an elusive, mythical premium product that you have to journey to a hardcore tobacco store to find. In SM NA's view, the Round Can is always going to be a niche product and they have no real plans to do a big push again. They're content to just let the occasional pipe and cigar smoker buy a can out of curiosity and hope they like it.

2. Cigarette smokers don't go to tobacconists; they buy their smokes at C-stores (which are littered with Camel and Marlboro chillers). Hence the new blend. They plan on pushing it as hard as possible, with an eye towards educating the public on to what "real" snus is. Hopefully, these casual snusers will then seek out the Round Can and drive up the demand for it. (This eventually worked for Coors, but it took 30 years for them to get their beer into nationwide distribution. Hopefully snusers won't have to wait that long.)

3. Ten years down the road, when every person in America knows what snus is and they're all familiar with the General brand, perhaps they can abandon these "casual" products and we'll have the entire European Swedish Match catalog available at every big tobacconist in the country, with at least the "big" names like General and Ettan being available at virtually every single c-store in the country.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not all comfortable with every plan presented to us. I think some of it is a good idea, other points strike me as utterly dumb. But quite honestly, if these new blends are a failure in the US market, there's a very good likelihood that Swedish Match NA is going to completely pull out of the snus market. This will hurt us ALL. As much as it pains me to say this in some ways, if you want to see Swedish snus in every store in the US, you'll need to get your family and friends to all go down and buy these little 15 portion packs of Americanized General snus and spread the word as wide as you can. This is (in my opinion) a last ditch effort for SM getting the US to switch to Swedish snus, and if it doesn't work, they're just going to go back to pushing Longhorn, Timberwolf and Red Man, where they have a comfortable market presence.

One more thing I wish to stress- the "new" General is every bit a quality product as the other General. It's manufactured in Sweden side-by-side with the other Swedish Match products, and it has the same blend of 28 different tobaccos that goes into most of the General line. It's really not too far from a "genuine" General flavor that we'd all expect. I like it. Not enough nicotine for me, but it's the best Swedish snus that I think has ever been created for the American market- even better than Triumph, which I thought was pretty good for a snus you could walk in and buy at Speedway.

[rllksxl]

Thanks for the detailed info Ephemeris. I like the strategy of pricing it higher than Camel, and I can get behind keeping the round can exclusive. I'm not sold on the idea that Americans will only buy mint. We have a lot of Americans here that don't, and I don't think we're particularly special.

I guess we'll see how it works for them, eh?

[Mawdryn]

Who else will be STUNNED if this works for SM? I just don't see it happening, but I hope I'm wrong...

[wadetheblade]

Alot of you guys have really good points and theories, and unfortunately most Americans will never like the taste of real Swedish snus. A friend of mine quit smoking using camel snus. Every time I see him he has a can. He's tried many kinds of real snus I've brought over, but every time he says they are too strong or too salty. Sometimes he'll use my girlfriends mini General or GR mini's, but he always has a damn can of camel. He's a mixed martial arts wrestler for god's sake. The funny thing about my friend is his room mate, which happens to be a chick, loves the Swedish snus, whenever I'm there she says "can I have a snus" certainly. She loves Nick and Johnny and General long sterk. I guess Americans generally do have poor taste. I'm about to hang out with them tonight and do some drinking, better grab some minis from the freezer.... geez!
Note: my girlfriend uses it all (She is scared to try Thunder frosted though) but prefers the minis when she is in public.

[Jwalker]

WHY THE ****! WHY IS THERE LESS NICOTINE IN THEM!!!! For crying out loud you can reduce the amount later or introduce a mini portion later but that IS THE MAIN PROBLEM WITH CAMEL, MARLBORO, and SKOAL is the lack of nicotine which MAKES THEM SEEM LIKE A RIP OFF!

Edit: Even the kid we all made fun of was worth the 50 dollars if they'd listen to him, he said the main problem was they were weak, also I'm talking like 9-11 mg/s you don't need to make it thunder or odens level.