Brand Failures

142 Brand failures
47 RJ Reynolds’ Joe
Camel campaign
RJ Reynolds’ attempt to create smokeless cigarettes (see Chapter 3) was not
the tobacco company’s only brand failure. In the 1990s, RJR got into big
trouble over one of its campaigns to promote its leading brand of cigarettes,
Camel. The campaign featured a character called Joe Camel, a cartoon camel
who wore trendy clothes and sunglasses and who had a cigarette dangling
from his mouth.
In 1991 the company was publicly charged in the Journal of the American
Medical Association with targeting children through the Joe Camel character.
That same year, the company got into further trouble when Janet Mangini,
a San Francisco family lawyer, filed a lawsuit against the company. In doing
this, she became the first person to legally challenge the tobacco industry for
targeting children with its advertising.
However, the Joe Camel campaign survived until 1997, when various
Californian local authorities intervened and came to Janet Mangini’s aid. A
trial date was set for December 1997. In preparation for the trial, the
prosecuting lawyers discovered that RJR had researched the reasons why
people start smoking and the smoking patterns of children. The lawsuit
charged that as a result of this secret research, the tobacco giant developed
advertising and promotional campaigns aimed directly at children, encouraging
them to smoke Camel cigarettes.
As the trial approached, RJR asked whether the Mangini lawsuit could be
resolved ‘if the campaign was pulled.’ However, in order to avoid court, RJR
also had to make sure that the previously confidential internal documents