Juul's strategy for success: target children, steadily ramp up nicotine levels

Juul -- now a subsidiary of the company that owns Marlboro -- attained its $12.8B valuation by growing faster than any other vaping company, thanks in large part to the children who bought its products, reversing decades of progress in getting teens off nicotine products while simultaneously monopolizing the market for vaping products

Juul's other secret to success was to steadily ramp up the levels of deadly, highly addictive nicotine in its products, being the first to leap from 1-2% nicotine refills to 5% refills -- a move that touched off an arms-race with other manufacturers, leading to the status quo where nearly all refills are 5-7% nicotine.

One of Juul's key innovations was a patented "nicotine salt" that offset the bitter flavor of nicotine, allowing users to consume much higher levels of nicotine without having to endure a bad taste.

Ramping up nicotine levels didn't just make Juul's products more addictive, it made being a nicotine addict more affordable: the major costs of a vape refill are not the liquid, but the pod, its manufacture and distribution.

Americans get more toxic versions of Juul's products. The tighted regulatory environment in countries like the UK and Israel have limited Juul to the sale of 1.7% refills.

The vaping industry now sells liquid in non-childproof bottles that contain enough nicotine to "kill an entire preschool class."

The findings about Juul's pioneering role in increasing the nicotine in vaping products were reported in the BMJ journal Tobacco Control, in a study entitled Nicotine arms race: JUUL and the high-nicotine product market (Sci-Hub mirror) written by a pair of Stanford researchers. Read the rest