The efforts come in response to shoppers' growing love for lower-priced brands that they perceive to be at parity with premium-priced counterparts in quality and performance.

As for the company's lower-priced brands, the domestic market share continued to erode.

At the same time, several lower-priced brands that are widely popular in Ireland, like Paddy, have been taken off the American market.

"It had the unintended and costly consequence," he added, "of shifting orders to the company's lower-priced, lower-margin brand."

Still, the disappearance is intriguing because it comes when Marlboro sales are unexpectedly slumping as a result of increasingly fierce competition from lower-priced brands.

Imports of lower-priced Canadian brands have increased 45-fold.

At the same time, however, recession-weary smokers switched to lower-priced brands at a record pace, leaving warehouse filled to the brim with cigarettes.

Haggar makes lower-priced brands, both for mass merchandisers and for other stores to sell under their own labels.

You can start with lower-priced brands and then build up.

The company, which controls 43.3 percent of the American market, has also been aggressively building its lower-priced brands, Cambridge and Bucks.