Word: rjr
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...company is more aware of which way the smoke is blowing than RJR. Last month it gave in to protest and dropped its plans for a cigarette for blacks called Uptown. Now RJR is mired in criticism over its intention to test-market a new cigarette called Dakota. The controversy began when an antismoking group, the Advocacy Institute, released copies of a marketing plan for Dakota that had been leaked to the institute. The documents, which call the cigarette Project VF, for virile female, describe the typical customer as an entry-level factory worker, 18 to 20 years...
...While RJR dismissed the documents as spurious and inaccurate, health experts and women's groups accused RJR of targeting uninformed young women for death. Lung cancer among women has jumped more than fivefold in the past 20 years, and now surpasses breast cancer as the leading cause of death. "I cannot understand how any self-respecting company could seek to exploit so deliberately a group of young women," said Molly Yard, president of the National Organization for Women. Despite the furor, RJR is going ahead with plans to test Dakota...
...RJR's reported strategy for Dakota heightened concerns that tobacco companies are trying to indoctrinate children and recruit minors. Half of all current smokers first lighted up by age 15, some 90% before they were 19. Some critics believe the industry is deliberately capitalizing on adolescents' desires to be popular and attractive by attributing those qualities to smoking / in its $2.5 billion annual ad spending. "You certainly don't see ads featuring 65-year-olds," notes Karl Bauman, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health. Thomas Lauria of the Tobacco Institute, the industry...
...investors are watching carefully for signs of weakness in the ultimate deal: the 1988 buyout of RJR Nabisco, which Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, headed by Henry Kravis, acquired for $25 billion. The battle for RJR combined all the excesses of the era, pitting Milken and Kravis against Cohen and F. Ross Johnson, the RJR chairman who stood to make more than $100 million by winning the fight. The victorious Kravis walked off with $75 million in fees alone as part of his prize...
Obviously rushed into print, Barbarians is rich in detail and anecdote but poor in analysis, often reading like 100 Wall Street Journal articles pasted end to end. After a forced march through the history of the RJR fight, the narrative ends on a question that should have been raised -- and wrestled with -- from the start: "What did all this have to do with doing business...