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| GENERAL ALL OUT FOR MACANUDO 1968 |
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Page 1 of 2  Plus: Our Register & Winner of the week!Los Angeles, September 10 – What may well be the most intense launch campaign ever undertaken for a new cigar brand will get started in two smokeshops next Thursday. That’s when the Macanudo 1968 National Tasting Tour will start at Jungle Jim’s of Fairfield, Ohio and at Liberty Smokes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They are the first two of an incredible 423 in-store events that will take place in just 22 days to promote this new version of the venerable Macanudo brand, now celebrating its 40th anniversary in the hands of General Cigar. The Tour will visit shops in 41 states over three weeks with six states slated for 20 or more events: Michigan is scheduled for 19 events and the Tour will end (for now) on October 9 at The Tasting Room in Minona, Wisconsin. Our exclusive list of in-store promotions is dominated by the Macanudo 1968 program. General’s campaign reaches far beyond stores with advertising in magazines with a strong audience of adult men, including Esquire, Golf Digest, Men’s Journal, Playboy, Yachting and others. What’s all the fuss about? The cigar itself marks the year (1968) when General Cigar bought the Temple Hall factory in Kingston, Jamaica. The acquisition included a series of brand trademarks, including Temple Hall and Macanudo, which had been marketed as a Jamaican cigar made under the supervision of the F. Palicio y Cia. firm from Cuba, which owned the Belinda, Hoyo de Monterrey and Punch brands in pre-Castro times. General re-blended it and launched it in 1971; it quickly became what it is today: the nation’s top-selling premium cigar. “We conceived Macanudo 1968 to pay homage to the previously-released expressions of the brand while offering an entirely new, rich smoking experience,” said Cooper Gardiner, General’s vice president for marketing. The cigar is made from tobaccos either grown by General on its owned farms, or from farms for which it bought the entire crop under contract. It will be the only Macanudo which does not use a Connecticut-grown wrapper; instead, it features an extra-dark Honduran-grown San Augustin wrapper with a Connecticut-grown Habano binder. The filler tobaccos are from the Dominican Republic and from the Nicaraguan island of Ometepe. |
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Did you know?
“After nationalization of the cigar trade, Cuba introduced only one new brand between 1960 and 1990: Cohiba.
