Health

Shorter and Stronger: A Cigarette for Today's World

by Jordan Yerman | February 3, 2008 at 02:49 pm

420 views | 5 Recommendations | 2 comments

What do you do when more than 50 nations ban the use of your product in public places? Make one that's half an inch shorter, apparently:

NIPPING out for a quick smoke is about to become even quicker. Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, is planning a “snack-size” cigarette for the smoking-ban age.

The compact cigarette will be shorter than existing brands but just as smoky: it will deliver the same potency while taking less time to puff.

Marlboro Intense is designed to appeal to employees who are forced to take quick outdoor cigarette breaks while at work, often in cold weather.

Philip Morris will test the cigarette in Turkey but believes it has worldwide potential, with more than 50 countries now having bans on smoking in public places.

When your clientele is addicted to your product, you won't care about PR fallout from making the new cigarette stronger instead of just shorter.

While a normal cigarette measures 8.5cm, the Marlboro Intense is just 7.2cm long. If it takes the average person 7 minutes to smoke a cigarette, our middle school math tells us that the average Intense would take just 6 minutes to enjoy (we calculated the time saved at 63 seconds).

We're not going to end this with a snarky, anti-smoking comment. That shit is like crack nicotine to the smoking crowd. We'll just observe how interesting it is that the miniaturizing trend (that could probably be best credited to consumer electronics) has made its way to tobacco products.