Philip Morris Tried to Pivot to Pharmaceuticals. It Didn't Go Well.
The Journal.
The Wall Street Journal
4.2 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2023
⏱️ 15 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | When people thought about Big Tobacco, they thought about Philip Morris. |
| 0:10.4 | That's our colleague, Jennifer Maloney. |
| 0:12.7 | Philip Morris sold many brands, but the most important one was Marlboro cigarettes, and |
| 0:20.0 | that's the biggest cigarette brand in the US, and a huge brand abroad as well, right? |
| 0:25.3 | There's an icon here, right? |
| 0:26.9 | The Marlboro man. |
| 0:28.1 | The Marlboro man. |
| 0:29.4 | Hot cup of coffee, a good smoke. |
| 0:32.7 | The simple things mean a lot out here, out here in Marlboro, country. |
| 0:40.2 | You know, and he's wearing the cowboy hat, and he's in, you know, Montana somewhere, and |
| 0:48.1 | for many people like that was, that was Tobacco, that was smoking, it was the Marlboro man. |
| 0:56.2 | That was the old Philip Morris. |
| 0:58.4 | The new Philip Morris has been trying to diversify away from cigarettes. |
| 1:03.7 | Over the last couple of years, the company has started moving into a new industry, health |
| 1:08.3 | care. |
| 1:10.2 | What happened? |
| 1:11.2 | Did it work the way that they'd hoped? |
| 1:13.2 | It didn't. |
| 1:14.2 | The CEO told me, I didn't expect people to push back on us going into health care. |
| 1:18.8 | I expected more encouragement for moving away from cigarettes. |
| 1:23.2 | And that's not at all what happened. |
| 1:25.1 | They had this idea that they could build a health and wellness business, and it hasn't |
... |
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