At U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company, our marketing goal is to find ways to effectively, responsibly and profitably connect our brands with adult tobacco consumers.
USSTC is guided by Altria Group’s
Mission, as well as Altria's
Code of Conduct, and is committed to marketing our products responsibly by building relationships between our brands and adult tobacco consumers while taking steps designed to limit reach to unintended audiences.
We primarily compete in the U.S. smokeless tobacco category with brands such as
Copenhagen,
Skoal,
Red Seal and
Husky. We design our marketing programs to enhance brand awareness, recognition and loyalty among adult tobacco consumers to grow market share.
We have practices in place to focus our marketing activities toward adult tobacco consumers while limiting reach to unintended audiences.
Instead, we primarily connect with adult tobacco consumers in two ways:
- One-to-one consumer communications, which include direct mail, email, consumer websites and consumer marketing activities with age-verified adult tobacco consumers 21 years of age or older.
- At retail, where we present our brands to legal-aged tobacco consumers at the point of purchase. We offer programs to help merchandise our products and to help restrict underage access to smokeless tobacco products.
We have programs in place designed to connect with our intended audience while
helping to prevent underage access to smokeless tobacco products. For example:
- Age Verification: We communicate one-to-one with adult tobacco consumers, and use procedures to verify a person is 21 years of age or older prior to sending any branded information or allowing access to our consumer websites. To assist retailers, we support the We Card® program that helps train and assist retail clerks to check ID's before selling tobacco products.
- In-store access: We work with retailers to restrict product access. Our retail merchandising program requires retailers to comply with applicable laws and regulations, including those that require merchandising smokeless tobacco products in a non-self-service manner. This program also includes additional measures that are not mandated by federal law to help reduce potential underage access.
- Product placement requests: We deny requests for permission to use or display our brands in any movies or television shows or other public entertainment media.
