A tobacco company launching a health product is nobody’s first guess for a brand people will trust. I led the commercial and brand strategy for BAT’s first OTC medicinal range – from clinical positioning to public health partnerships – and got it endorsed by the UK’s own medicines regulator.
BAT wanted to offer smokers a genuinely safer alternative to smoking: a portfolio of OTC medicinal brands built on real clinical grounds, not just a marketing claim. The most obvious problem sat inside the company’s own name. Nobody – healthcare practitioner or shopper – was inclined to take a health claim at face value from a tobacco company. I was responsible for leading the cross-functional team, R&D, manufacturing, supply, marketing, sales, regulatory and medical affairs, through developing and commercialising this portfolio.
Behind the scenes
the making of the commercial for VOKE
The situation
Credibility was the whole game before a single pack reached a shelf. The product could be clinically sound and still fail, if the brand telling that story came from a place people had no reason to believe.
What we did
We built the pipeline first – a range of OTC medicinal products designed to keep a steady stream of launches coming for the next five years – and grounded the positioning and communication strategy in real consumer insight across the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, rather than assumption. Because credibility was the whole game, I ran frequent top-to-top meetings with retailers to secure best-in-class execution at launch, built a healthcare-practitioner engagement strategy reaching GPs, pharmacists and their professional bodies, and worked directly with Public Health England, key opinion leaders and Cancer Research UK – not to spin the tobacco link away, but to anchor the brand’s communication in something a health professional could actually stand behind.
What happened
The strategy earned endorsement from the MHRA, the UK’s medicines regulator, as a genuinely safer alternative to smoking, backed by clinical testing that outperformed the competition. It landed a category-disruptive TVC and communication platform, and secured exclusivity with Tesco and Boots for the first three months, across three different store formats – the kind of retail trust a tobacco-owned brand doesn’t get by default.
The hardest part was never the science or the product – those were solid from day one. It was convincing a GP, a regulator and a shopper, separately, that this particular brand meant what it said, coming from where it came from.
Watch the commercial
