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While building the awareness of its connoisseur brands,Tabacalera poked fun at itself with the Vega Fina Natural campaign. The machine-rolled product tapped into pro football fans as the brand they can trade up to from mass market stogies or down to when they do not have the inclination to buy a $5 smoke. Along with sampling at sports bars and restaurants in NFL cities, print ads and airplane banners dragged above stadiums carried messages like "Premium cigars even the punter can afford,""For those who can't quite say aficionado," and "if you insist on an expensive cigar, light it with a $ 10 bill" Next month an image campaign breaks for cheap tiffany necklaces Louis Rey positioning the brand as the patron saint of the six-figure income, the leveraged buyout and the finer things in life.

Another tool Tabacalera is using to pass along knowledge and drive consumers to retailers is the Internet."There are two kinds of people: online and those that are not online," said Young."The online folks like to think that everyone else is not, and you've got to let them feel that they are in the know." Yahoo!'s Shereshewsky contends that there is a high correlation between premium cigar smokers and consumers who are online-more than 80%-and that demo is more affluent, older and more educated than your typical packaged goods consumer.

Among the early online forays was a Father's Day promo with Yahoo! for Romeo y Julieta.Tabacalera took ownership of a few generic terms like premium cigar, wine+cigars and competitor brands like Montecristo, Macanudo and Partagas so a banner ad for a free Romeo y Julieta cigar popped up on the results page when visitors executed a search.The link included a brief survey of cigar buying habits, and coupons were mailed to consumers with a map showing the 10 closest retailers.Last month, Tabacalera partnered online with Cigar Aficionado.A generic page on the magazine's Web site offered visitors who completed a short buying-- habit survey a video called The Art of Premium Cigar Making, starring cigar master Benji Menedez. Both online efforts increased the company's database of smokers and cheap tiffany pendants a window to their purchasing habits.

"There may be four different ways people look for a product,"said Young. "They may only buy robustos and only Dominican cigars. They may only shop for a certain wrapper or they only buy cigars that cost $4. There's a lot of different variables, and once you crack the code,you give them what they want."

On the education front,Tabacalera is using Menendez's instant credibility in an Ask Benji"Web page and is mulling a signing tour and dinners, at least with the retail trade. Other online initiatives on tap include another promotion with Yahoo! that cross markets watches, golf, travel, clothes and other undisclosed brand merchandise to motivate consumers to get involved with a Web page in addition to flagging nearby cigar retailers to visit with maps cheap tiffany rings coupons that can be downloaded from the Internet.

"What we're trying to do is get people to the tobacconist said Young."The relationship with the tobacconist is how you really enjoy what you're doing. It's an education and we're trying to hook up people interested in a product with people who are selling it.That's a relationship."

Snagging legal-smoking-age consumers may require special tactics. While there are a tiffany on sale share of image ads showing the successful middle-age and paunchless man with a gambler's glare and either a babe by his side or a snifter full of brandy in his cigarless hand, newer brands are taking a different tack to snag younger smokers, said Mike Jessee, assistant editor of Smoke magazine. Even in the post-fad days, enough women are still smoking cigars to warrant targeted ads. Thus, Domingold ran a beefcake ad of a topless hunk with a cigar in hand."You're not going to sell to women with the same kind of ads that have been targeted to men,"said Jessee.