PMI's CEO: "Quit smoking or you will never date my daughter"
Monday, March 6, 2023 at 16:35 Fair play to Philip Morris International's PR or comms team.
Whether by luck or design (probably the latter) they do a pretty decent job promoting the company's smoke free agenda, and the way they have consistently generated headlines with occasional but widely reported interviews with senior executives should also be acknowledged.
A prime example is André Calantzopoulos' appearance on Radio 4's Today programme in 2016 when the then CEO created global headlines after he told the BBC that Philip Morris could stop making conventional cigarettes.
Another is a 2018 interview in which Peter Nixon, then managing director of Philip Morris UK, told the Independent, "There is no reason for anyone to smoke any more." (As it happens I think this was arguably an own goal but it nevertheless generated a lot of publicity.)
I could list other examples but the most recent was on Saturday when the Financial Times published an interview with Calantzopoulos' successor:
The chief executive of the world’s largest tobacco group Philip Morris International is not short of anecdotes in which he implored people to quit smoking.
Over a cigarette at a US embassy party in Warsaw in the mid-2000s, Jacek Olczak recited the health warning on a pack to the then-Polish health minister. A few years later, the minister, Zbigniew Religa, died of lung cancer.
More recently, Olczak gave his eldest daughter’s boyfriend a stark choice: quit smoking or switch to IQOS, PMI’s flagship smoke-free alternative, “or you will never date my daughter”. A year later, he switched.
Even allowing for the fact that the story was probably tongue-in-cheek, I appear to be alone in pointing out that it's 2023 yet Olczak seems happy to portray himself playing hardball with his eldest daughter's choice of boyfriend.
Did she have no agency in this?!
I sensed a similarly flippant tone when the Independent interviewed Peter Nixon in 2018:
Among his 400 employees in London apparently, there is one hold-out who still smokes. “I’m working on him though.”
It struck me then that with almost one in seven adults still smoking in the UK in 2018, it was a bit odd that of the 400 people working for Philip Morris in London only one was still a smoker.
Or perhaps, like the boyfriend of Jacek Olczak's daughter, they had been given an ultimatum.
See: Philip Morris's CEO on quitting smoking and detoxifying the brand.
Below: The FT's Oliver Barnes, who interviewed PMI's CEO, tweets ...
Reader Comments (4)
I read the FT article the other day, when you shared it on Twitter, and it made my blood boil. Just because Olczak is wealthy, and has a mission for his company, he thinks he can tell people what to do, just as with Nixon and others before him. Both of them seem to have forgotten that the customer is right, not them. PMI should be boycotted by every smoker, as the disgraceful traitors to freedom of choice that they are.
PM has come a long way from when every employee got two free cartons a month!
I agree Marcus and that should include a boycott of Iqos. Get your HnB or vapes elsewhere. Don't support a company that despises you.
David B. The company has also come a long way since this
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/phillip-morris-toy-lighter/
What a bloody hypocrite it is. First it encouraged child smokers now those smokers are adults it thinks it owns them and can tell them what to do.
It should of course be defending them from the many abuses of the anti smoker industry but sees profit in abusing smokers more than selling them cigarettes or defending their right to be left alone without harassment.