Robert’s mother died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking. The retirement she had planned never came. It is a loss that makes his role as Head of Communications at Swedish Smokeless a personal, and sometimes uncomfortable, choice.
“Considering my loathing of the tobacco companies, it is deeply ironic that I ended up working for one,” he says.
He draws a distinction between the wider tobacco industry and the company he joined almost three years ago. At Swedish Smokeless, his communications work has centered on persuading people to move away from cigarettes.
“Simply put: we need to get people to stop smoking. Eight million lives a year is at stake. It should be a no-brainer to stop smoking from being legal.”
Robert sees smokeless nicotine alternatives as having a role in reducing the harm caused by smoking. Explaining that position, through scientific reports, articles and public discussion, occupies much of his time. Sweden’s relatively low level of daily smoking provides a familiar reference point. But he knows that the experience of his home market cannot simply be applied elsewhere.
“I must keep in mind that the society and rules where I live and work are very different from those in other countries. I just need to get on a plane to one of my favorite cities, Vienna, and I am instantly reminded of how common smoking used to be when I grew up.”
It is all about making people quit
Swedish Smokeless’ ambition to make people swap smoking for smokeless products is also reflected in the name change from GN Tobacco back in 2024. The name carries a heavy burden from the tobacco industry’s dark past.
To distinguish itself from competitors, Swedish Smokeless only uses natural ingredients like essential oils for flavoring. The quality control is also extremely strict. But Robert isn’t sure that the quality is that much higher than competitors like Swedish Match and Skruf.
“To be honest, many of our competitors use good ingredients too. The way I see it, we and our colleagues in the industry are all on a mission to make people stop smoking. If Oden’s Cold Extreme is a better product than General, or if our White Fox has a better minty taste than Zyn or Velo (which of course we believe) matters less to me.”
He says the communications strategy is therefore less concerned with persuading existing snus and nicotine pouch users to change brands than with encouraging smokers to leave cigarettes behind. With millions of people dying from tobacco use each year, he finds the continued acceptance of smoking difficult to reconcile with its consequences.
The company’s approach to communication has changed as the business has grown. Robert describes its origins as independent-minded, with little interest in copying other companies’ successes or following their example. This “rebel past” has slowly subsided.
Today, it operates more like a conventional business, in a category where marketing is tightly restricted. Small creative decisions can have consequences. He recalls a Swedish advertisement for White Fox nicotine pouches that fell foul of marketing rules because the photograph included a sprig of peppermint. Which is considered food and in Sweden, snus can’t be advertised with food items.
The experience illustrates how closely the details of an advertisement need to be examined, even when the creative idea appears straightforward.
A gathering of tribes
Inside the company, the transition has been less complete. Around 400 people works 24/7 making its snus and nicotine pouch products, but Robert says the working culture still resembles that of a much smaller operation. In the early days, the owner worked long days and nights alongside a handful of people to get the business established. Decisions still rest largely with the owner and a small group of key people, who work closely with colleagues in research and development, quality assurance, production and logistics.
Robert describes the teams as “tribes”: small, closed groups with clear responsibilities and a good understanding of their own work. Information travels readily within them. Helping people see what is happening elsewhere in the business is a more recent priority.
“We have only recently begun working professionally with internal communications and culture-building. Going from a strict need-to-know basis to a more open culture of sharing. But it is a project worthy of a five-year plan…”
The purpose is partly practical, but it is also about recognition. He wants colleagues to understand more of what other teams contribute and to share some of the pride that already exists within individual parts of the company. Today, amazing things are going on in teams across the production, and in sister companies in both Sweden, Armenia and other countries as well.
And as he puts it, the aim is to “spread all the love” between those groups.
When silence becomes a strategy
Robert’s earlier career gave him plenty of experience in crisis communication. First as a communications consultant working with IT and telecoms clients, and later as Head of Communications at one of the world’s largest IT consultancies.
“Receiving a call at 4am when something had gone seriously wrong used to be just another Tuesday for me. But for me, being in a crisis is invigorating and exciting. So while I have to appreciate the business risks and that implications of what is going on in the crisis, I also find the process very rewarding.”
He joined GN Group and Swedish Smokeless after a period of media difficulties, expecting to deal with negative coverage and other problems. So far, it has been relatively calm.
He is careful about sounding disappointed.
“Few people wish they had more problems at work, and you should always be careful what you wish for.”
What concerns him more is a change he sees in the way public figures and organizations respond when things go wrong. The traditional advice was straightforward: be transparent, show concern for those affected, take responsibility and keep people informed.
Increasingly, he sees the opposite approach.
“Deny, blame others or simply stay silent. I see this strategy being used on a weekly basis, and it is sad how often it works to get the media and others to stop talking about the topic.”
For someone whose career has involved helping organizations respond to difficult situations, promoting the transparency, the apparent effectiveness of those tactics is dispiriting.
AI – a brilliant and terrible companion
Robert uses AI regularly, mostly Gemini and ChatGPT after the Astra update. Although he readily acknowledges that he and the company barely scratch the surface of what could be done.
“In general, being data-driven has been a mantra over the last few years. But in many businesses, the quality of the internal data as well as the external business intelligence is simply not good enough for an AI to draw any solid conclusions. Hence, the AI far too often delivers faulty advice.”
His day-to-day use of AI tools is more concrete. He has an AI assistant that works from his synopsis or draft and develops the text in his usual tone. Klang AI summarizes meetings and produces lists of decisions and actions. DeepL has made translation work considerably easier and faster. Research is where he has noticed the greatest difference, particularly when looking for scientific reports from universities and other institutions.
That does not mean he can let the AI plan, research and write the articles without a human-in-the-loop as AI people call it. The tools still misunderstand instructions and arrive at strange conclusions. He sees careful prompting and quality control as essential parts of using them but still, the output can be bonkers…
The company also uses All Ears to monitor spoken content, including television news, YouTube, radio and podcasts. Reports alert him when footballers, musicians and others mention its products in interviews. For a company that is small compared with Philip Morris or BAT, those references are of particular interest. Robert says that the Siberia snus and nicotine pouches feature prominently in the company’s monitoring of media and social media, giving him a view of how the brand is discussed beyond its own communications. But it is also a cornerstone of the company to not use these references in the marketing.
Choosing the industry—and living outside it
Robert is clear about his attachment to Swedish Smokeless and its founder, Gevorg Nalbandyan. He is equally clear that this does not amount to pride in the tobacco industry as a whole.
“I am not proud of being part of the tobacco industry. But I am proud to be part of Swedish Smokeless and our founder Gevorg Nalbandyan’s vision and ventures.”
His advice to a young communications or marketing professional considering the sector begins with that distinction. Think carefully about whether it is an industry you want to work in, he says, and about how that choice might be viewed later in your career.
“Once you join ‘the dark side’, you might find it difficult to get hired by a children’s hospital. Or anywhere where trust and benevolence are cornerstones.”
It is a candid assessment, tempered by his own experience: the work can be absorbing and well paid. He does not pretend the decision is free of complications.
Something completely different
Outside work, he spends much of his time with his 17-year-old daughter. They recently returned from eight days in Tokyo, which has become their new favorite city. He and his fiancée have also bought an old farm on an island in the Stockholm archipelago.
He spent much of his career lugging around a Macbook Air and an iPhone. So now he is looking forward to work that requires different kinds of hardware.
“At the end of a week, I long for some hands-on manual labour. The farm is several hundred years old, so there is no shortage of it. Wherever I look, I see things needing fixed. But it only fills me with joy and calm.”
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