Philip Morris pays anti-smoking volunteers, but there's a bigger game
Marketing is arguably the most important aspect of any company. You only need to attract the attention of gullible minds to take your product to the top. Philip Morris knows this well. After all, becoming the world's second-biggest tobacco company doesn't come easy. So when it says it wants to pay people for convincing others to give up smoking, it has already grabbed eyeballs.
The bait: 'Rs. 4,200 for converting one smoker to non-smoker!'
Peter Nixon, UK and Ireland MD, says Philip Morris is committed: "One day we want to stop selling cigarettes." The brand is so committed that it has announced it will pay its brand ambassadors - "freelancers" - for convincing people to give up smoking: £50 (Rs. 4,200) per "conversion" from smoker to non-smoker. For seven days, the freelancer would help with a specially-designed program.
This isn't even its first "anti-smoking" attempt
This isn't the company's first attempt to discourage smoking. Last November, it released Iqos, a smokeless cigarette, which apparently cuts down the level of harmful chemicals produced by up to 95%. "Our main objective is to help people move away from cigarettes," Nixon insists.
Almost a decade ago, Philip Morris cheered an anti-smoking law
In fact, Philip's anti-smoking campaign can be traced till 2001, when the US was considering a law tightening regulations on tobacco companies. Unlike its rivals, Philip Morris actively supported the bill. Experts figured it was because it already commanded market dominance (the new bill made advertising difficult) and it wanted "the public-health community to join them in finding the holy grail: the safe cigarette".
So what are they not telling you?
Before understanding Philip Morris' bigger game, one needs to know about WHO's FCTC- the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. It's a global treaty aimed at reducing smoking rates. Since it came into force in 2005, dozens of countries have adopted anti-smoking measures. However, implementation of significant clauses remains stalled. Now it's clear that secretive campaigns by Philip Morris and others were at play.
What's Philip Morris got to do with the FCTC?
In one of the biggest tobacco industry leaks, Reuters secured a cache of documents from the company. It includes internal emails, market analyses and lobbying plans. Turns out, all this while, Philip Morris was secretly working to defeat the first WHO-negotiated tobacco control treaty.
What exactly did Philip Morris do?
The revelations were staggering: Philip Morris had met officials of different countries' governments in secret during FCTC conventions in 2014 and 2016. In 2014 (Moscow), it set up a "coordinating room" from where they controlled operations. In 2016 (Delhi), executives operated from a hotel located an hour away. They didn't join their colleagues at the convention. The aim: to weaken key treaty provisions.
But can a tobacco company take on the WHO?
The documents from 2009-2016 traced the secretive campaign, one of the broadest corporate lobbying efforts, from Asia to Africa to the US. Apart from FCTC conferences, it also targets countries independently where FCTC delegations are determined and agreements shaped into laws. With 600 corporate affairs executives and $7bn-plus in annual net profit, Philip Morris has enough resources to overwhelm the FCTC.
Millions of lives are at stake. Time to wake up
According to researchers, WHO-recommended anti-smoking measures led to 53mn people in 88 countries giving up smoking between 2007-2014. 22mn smoking-related deaths will be averted because of the treaty, they predict. But lobbying by tobacco companies has meant only a 1.9% decline in global cigarette sales since 2005. The stakes are high. The battle is urgent. Will we continue letting these Philip Morrises to dupe us?
