Hasta La Gadget!

Japanese FMCG are always interesting to us, mostly due to the rapid product cycle, off-beat marketing campaigns, strange flavor combinations, lots of collaborations, and modern crowdsourcing methods.

While cigarettes and coffee have been paired up at the register, we recently found two products that seem to be searching for a product match.

The “Pan” coffee from Roots below advertises itself as the perfect compliment to eating bread. In fact, the word pan literally means “bread”, and there’s a picture of a sandwich that looks suspiciously like the sandwiches available in convenience stores. Thus, if you’re holding a sandwich and looking for a coffee as well, which one looks more suitable?

The Cabin “Roast Blend” cigarettes, recently released, go quite far to associate themselves with coffee. The cigarettes themselves are long and dark colored, internal pamphlets offer coffee makers for lucky winners, and the packaging itself is not only suited for sitting next to a hot cuppa, but even says “For Rich Coffee Break”. Naturally, if you like coffee, what cigarettes would you buy?

This is an interesting tactic, because it does stand out rather well amidst a sea of competition. One convenience store shelf can have over twenty different types of canned coffee, and many times that in cigarette choices, so the marketers are appealing to the other consumption habits of consumers to get their attention.

So, all we need now is bread made to go with cigarettes and we’ll have a complete consumption circle! Both Roots canned coffee and Cabin cigarettes are made by Japan Tobacco, so all they need to do is get their foods division in action.