Projects Lolita, Cosmic, Scum, Virile Female, Etc.: the Tobacco
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Projects Lolita, Cosmic, Scum, Virile Female, etc.: The Tobacco Industry’s Colorfully-Named Projects in the 1970s, 1980s and ‘90s Robert N. Proctor Name Brands and Marketing Niches 6 Targeting Young People 11 Studying and Manipulating Health Effects 15 Changing Cigarette Designs and Manufacturing Methods to Make Cigarettes Appear Safe 19 Improving Business Practices and Manufacturing Methods 20 Propaganda, Litigation, and Political Projects 25 How Were Projects Named? 27 Conclusions 35 Appendix: 2000 Tobacco Industry Projects: A Listing 38 Our focus here is on a linguistic oddity—or rather monstrosity: the coining of project names for tobacco-industry initiatives in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Philip Morris was the master of this art, producing literally hundreds of names for research projects, using colorful monikers drawn from art, science, religion, classical mythology, and popular culture. But all leading tobacco manufacturers from this era used such codings to a greater or lesser extent (Lorillard, however, tended to use alpha-numeric codings for its projects). The document trail is not perfect, and new names will surely emerge as the archives are expanded, but the record is already clear enough to allow us to identify nearly 2000 named projects, descriptions of which are attached here as a (very long) Appendix. This can be regarded as a reference tool or “meta-archive,” which should prove useful for further analyses. My point in exploring the names given to such projects is primarily to better understand the strength, scope and dedication of the industry’s research and marketing efforts. Here we have a certain onomastic genius gone wild, a marketing mania that led to coinages of remarkable color and variety. How are we to understand this profusion? Many of these project names, which culminate in number and diversity in the 1980s, represent an effort on the part of company scientists to jazz up the mundane work of product development. They also can be seen as an index of 2 market muscle in an industry with unprecedented resources at its disposal. There was a great deal of marketing talent in the industry at this time, with much effort put into product innovation—or at least the semblance of innovation. In 1989 alone, for example, the makers of Marlboro introduced 68 new kinds of cigarettes, each with its own distinctive project name.1 A Brown and Williamson list of projects from 1978 boasts 82 entries;2 another list by the same company from 1983 classifies 31 distinct projects according to four separate ranks of priority (i.e., urgency).3 Another interesting fact about these project names is that they were for internal use only. Pharmaceutical companies or automobile manufacturers coin enticing names for their products (think of the Ford Lincoln Mercury Cougar, which is just one car), but tobacco projects were by and large private, often playful, with most of the humorous names being insider jokes never intended to be revealed to the public. Project mania also sprang from a new style of business management, insofar as “quality groups,” “quality circles,” “drive teams” “total quality measures,” and “circles of excellence”4 within the various firms were being given a certain degree of autonomy to brainstorm and organize product development—including the right to name a given initiative. The organization of work in terms of projects was a form of “problem solving,” whereby responsibility for a particular product or process would be assigned to a team with a leader responsible for keeping to a schedule and making progress. The goal, as Philip Morris Europe’s research chief in 1978 put it, was to “reduce all ‘problems’ to projects.”5 1 Philip Morris USA, “Strategic Plan,” circa 1991, Bates 2021391579; compare the “Quarterly Report” for Philip Morris Europe for March of 1992, which lists about a hundred named projects (Bates 2028633450-3612). A good computer printout of project names, responsible parties and “Funded By” can be found at legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/ukn17b00. 2 R. Wilson (Brown & Williamson), “Leaf Department Project Code List for 1979,” Dec. 15, 1978, Bates 620169188-9193. 3 A. J. Mellman (Brown & Williamson), “New Product Portfolio Analysis,” Sept. 1, 1983, Bates 659048105. 4 Philip Morris held numerous “Pack Rappers Quality Circle Meetings” in 1987; see “Central File Extract,” Aug. 7, 1996, Bates 2057529580-9633. Lorillard implemented “Lorillard Circles” at its Greensboro facility in 1982; see “Bowes Announces New Program For The Greensboro Branch,” Lorillard Informer, Nov.-Dec. 1981, Bates 89792650-2669. 5 M. Häusermann (PME) to J. Gibson, Nov. 20, 1978, Bates 1003481637-1644, p. 6. 3 The industry’s project mania can also, though, be interpreted as a kind of carefree quiet before the storm, in that the large-scale litigation of the 1990s was not yet on the horizon. Some of these names may appear a bit silly or even offensive today, and it is not likely the industry ever thought these would be made public. Deposition of industry documents in public archives and on internet searchable sites, however, has made it possible to survey these across a broad swath. Many such project names are available from the quarterly reports of the major tobacco manufacturers, but the introduction of Optical Character Recognition in 2007 has also made more systematic searches of project titles possible. UCSF’s Legacy document site has been full-text searchable by word string since 2007, making many new kinds of searches possible. Specific project titles can now be searched, obtaining documents sets that also reference other projects. * * * * * The number of projects of the sort reviewed here was large, probably upwards of several thousand.6 So many that you can often discover such names simply by guessing. Searching quasi-randomly, I entered a number of hot button words onto the tobaccodocuments.org website, using quote marks and the “Project *” format to see if that particular project existed. Quite by chance, I was able to hit upon Project Descartes, Project Waterloo and Project Delight. Once I found there were Projects Jupiter, Mars, Neptune, and Uranus, it was not hard to predict the existence of Projects Mercury, Sun, Moon, Saturn, Pluto and Venus (Philip Morris also had Projects Pegasus, Pliade, Hydra and Deimos). Once I’d noticed Projects Panther, Jaguar, Cheetah and Puma it was not hard to predict Projects Lion and Tiger. There are many such series. In 1989 alone, Philip Morris Europe’s R&D center in Neuchatel had project clusters named for artists (Projects Rembrandt, Rubens, Picasso, Pissarro, Degas, Gaugin, Vermeer, Tintoretto, Toyo, Giotto, Turner, Whistler, Warhol, Courbet), birds (Falcon, Hen, Boobook, Ibis, Goose, Wren, Tit, Eagle, Pheasant, Ostrich), oriental markets (SASO, Haba, Ankara), 6 A discussion of many project names can be found in G. Doris Cullen et al., “A Guide to Deciphering the Internal Codes Used by the Tobacco Industry,” Aug. 2005, Report No.03-05, Harvard School of Public Health, Tobacco Research Program. Many industry research summaries describe dozens of named projects; see, for example, B.A.T. (U.K. and Export) Ltd., Research and Development Centre, Applied Research and Development, “Status Review Notes, Period Ending December 1989,” Bates 562402593-2654; also the 26-page, “Chronology of Projects” to or from Ernest Clements, squirreled away in the files of Brown & Williamson and listed as a Confidential Attorney Work Project, May 27, 1988, Bates 1005.01. 4 European rivers (Moselle, Meuse, Somme, Vienne, Creuse, etc.) and garden and/or wood-working tools (Projects Rake, Nipper, Hatchet, Chisel, and Spade). There are dozens of clusters of this sort, many of which designate specific corporate agendas—typically a new market region, cigarette design, packaging technology, manufacturing method, political-influence campaign, or target population. The most important companies involved in generating projects with well- defined names were Philip Morris (including PM Europe), Reynolds, BAT, and Brown and Williamson. Philip Morris’s research facility in Neuchatel, Switzerland, is a major source of such projects; the company acquired the Fabriques de Tabac Reunies in 1963, and many of its product developments were given project names. References to such projects appear in numerous sources— notably the “Quarterly Reports” from the research departments of the sponsoring companies. The Spring 1984 report for Philip Morris Europe, for example, describes projects Alvar, Baseball, Bosse, BPP, Colorado, Corrida, Dakota, Edith, Fabienne, Flavor Development, Florida, Gamma, Golf, Heat, Honda, Kalle, Magic, Maryland, Material Testing QA, Muriel, Olga, Petra, Ping-Pong, Polo, Prost, QA Analytical Services, Sausalito, SOPRON, Subjective Cigarette Evaluation, Torro, Venus, Verge 006, and Vinaigrette.7 Similar clusters are described in research reports from BAT, Reynolds, and the other leading companies. In the interest of completeness, and to get a better sense of how the industry operates, I have assembled at the end of this paper a list of project titles identified thus far. I have listed only those with well-defined names with “Project” as the first word in their title. I have not listed projects with no well-defined name, nor those in which the word Project appears at the end of the title, as in Reynolds’ 1978 “Nitrosamine Project,” or Jones-Day’s notorious “Corporate Activity Project,” or Philip Morris’ “Wal-Mart Planogram Project” (this latter being an effort to optimize the distribution of Marlboros in the world’s largest supermarket). I have also omitted projects for which the name was narrative or overly long—as in “Project Smoking Characteristics of Winston vs. Marlboro Smokers”—since these are generally not as well-defined and could include nearly every activity of the industry characterized as a “project.” Nor—with some exceptions—have I listed those many projects whose titles were alpha-numeric (Lorillard’s Projects B 480 or C 194, for example),8 nor those with simple project numbers.