The Most Impossible Rise of a Company Ever: Marlboro

In 1924, Philip Morris launched Marlboro as a women's cigarette — filtered, perfumed, sold with a red "beauty tip" to hide lipstick stains. By 1954, it held less than one percent of the American cigarette market. By 1972, it was the best-selling cigarette on Earth. By the mid-1970s, it was number one in the United States. It still is. This is the story of how that happened — and it's a story in two parts. The first part is the one everybody knows: Leo Burnett, the Chicago ad man who took a dead brand and turned it into the most iconic advertising campaign in American business history. The cowboy. The flip-top box. Marlboro Country. The relaunch that sent sales from 18 million cigarettes in 1954 to over 6 billion in 1955. The second part stayed hidden for decades. It involves a research facility on Commerce Road in Richmond, Virginia, ammonia-based tobacco chemistry, and internal industry documents that rival companies kept sealed in confidential files until litigation forced them into the open. A 1989 Brown & Williamson document puts it in five words: "The secret of Marlboro is ammonia." One trick was visible. The other was not. Together, they built the most successful consumer product the world has ever seen — and the people who paid for it were the smokers. Sources: Stevenson, T. & Proctor, R.N. "The Secret and Soul of Marlboro: Phillip Morris and the Origins, Spread, and Denial of Nicotine Freebasing." American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 98, No. 7, July 2008. Proctor, R.N. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. University of California Press, 2011. Brown & Williamson internal documents, UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library. The Marlboro Oral History and Documentation Project, Leo Burnett Company records, UCSF Industry Documents Library. Marlboro market share data compiled by Goldstein from industry documents and financial reports, cited in Harris, J.E. et al., "Cigarette Smoking Before and After an Excise Tax Increase and an Antismoking Campaign," PMC / National Institutes of Health. Philip Morris corporate history and Richmond manufacturing records, Altria Group archives and Richmond Times-Dispatch reporting.