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Marketer to Employees: Quit Smoking Or You're Fired!

  • Ad Age, Monday, December 19, 2005 11:30 AM
Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. is planning to increase its marketing budget with money it plans to save on health-care costs by forcing its employees who smoke to either quit or lose their jobs. Scotts, already the largest ad spender in the retail lawn and garden category, plans to boost advertising spending from 5.6 percent of sales in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, or $143 million, to around 7 percent of sales this fiscal year behind its Smith & Hawken garden supply line and a series of new Scotts and Miracle Gro lawn and plant-care products. Bob Bernstock, president-COO, said funding for the increased spending is coming largely from Project Excellence, a wide-ranging efficiency and cost-cutting program that includes more focused product rollouts, headcount reductions and an effort to control health-care costs by eliminating smokers from the company's employment rolls. Scotts will implement the anti-smoking policy over the course of the next year, meaning existing employees will have to quit smoking or lose their jobs. The company is offering smoking cessation programs to the roughly one third of Scotts employees who now smoke, Chairman-CEO Jim Hagedorn said.

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