I was 10 on April 2, 1993, the day that the brand died.

On that day, Phillip Morris dealt a 20 percent slash to the price of its cigarettes in an effort to take on bargain brands, which were seriously pwning Marlboro’s market share. The slash had serious repercussions. If Marlboro’s carefully groomed brand wasn’t enough to take on the generic brands, then there no longer was truth to the brand equity mania that had rocked the eighties.

That is, if the brand was not powerful enough to sway sales on its own, if a marketing icon like Phillip Morris had to give in to the utterly lowbrow price war being waged against it, then the brand was as good as dead.

The panic that spread over Wall Street was immediate: Philip Morris’s stock fell 26 percent, and with it, other high-profile brands went down, among them Coca-Cola, Heinz, Quaker Oats, and PepsiCo. The brand is dead, experts said. As a result, companies cut advertising spending dramatically.

But the brand did not die. In fact, the opposite happened… Read more at The Cause Is The Habit