On Location: PMI reveals IQOS Curious X Sensorium Piazza in Milan

Philip Morris International (PMI) has revealed the first designer collaboration for its smoke-free product IQOS. The Curious X: Sensorium Piazza, created in collaboration with Italian design house SELETTI, was revealed during Milan Design Week (7-13 April) and available to the public at the Opificio 31 Totona Rocks.

The Moodie Davitt Report Brands Director Hannah Tan was on location for the press event on 7 April, attended by over 150 global media alongside PMI executives.

The Curious X: Sensorium Piazza, described as a ‘bold reimagination of the Italian piazza’, combined technology and art in a space where people could meet and exchange ideas. The exhibit transformed from day to night into an archive of human connections – processing the memories, voices and figures of those who passed through.

The colourful installation invited guests to step into the dedicated photo booths to capture a picture, which was then transformed into constantly evolving digital art broadcast onto the installation.

The Sensorium Piazza is the first project to be released within the IQOS Curious X platform, which will see PMI partner with over 20 multi-media artists from around the world to create artworks and installations that push the creative boundaries inspired by IQOS.

According to the brand owner, IQOS Curious X will deliver inspiring experiences to the brand’s growing community of adult consumers. The campaign’s results will be revealed in the autumn, alongside a high-profile and limited-edition product launch.

The event began with a panel discussion featuring PMI President Smoke-Free Products & Chief Consumer Officer Stefano Volpetti, SELETTI Creative Director and CEO Stefano Seletti, and PMI Italy President & Managing Director Pasquale Frega.

At Tortona Rocks, PMI also ran an exhibition area which showcased its latest smoke-free products, complete with product personalisation and experiential elements.

Commenting on his eponymous brand’s partnership with PMI, Seletti said: “Revolution is our primary philosophy. It is a philosophy that makes us think in a new way. It is precisely this that has allowed us to involve other product sectors.

“Creativity is essentially innovation. You always have to do something that no one has ever done before.”

Interview: PMI’s mission of creating a smoke-free future

During the event, The Moodie Davitt Report sat down with PMI President of Smoke-Free Products & Chief Consumer Officer Stefano Volpetti and PMI Global Travel Retail Vice President Beste Ermaner to discuss the thinking behind the Curious X: Sensorium Piazza, the IQOS Curious X platform and how curiosity is driving PMI’s wider mission of creating a smoke-free future.

Curiosity – which PMI President Smoke-Free Products & Chief Consumer Officer Stefano Volpetti describes as the engine of creativity and innovation – is at the heart of the IQOS brand.

According to Volpetti, Stefano Seletti – known for his clever take on ceramics and objects d’art – was the best choice for this partnership.

He said, “Our collaboration with SELETTI is driven by the shared belief that curiosity paves the way to groundbreaking creativity which inspires us to connect, explore new possibilities beyond the limits and challenge the status quo. Being forever curious is what ultimately enables our quest for the continuous development of better smoke-free alternatives.

“SELETTI has taken the Italian piazza, something very traditional and fundamental in Italian culture, and transformed it into something modern and dynamic. Together with SELETTI, we have reinvented the piazza to be a multi-sensorial experience that combines technology and art, physical and digital.

“The IQOS Curious X: Sensorium Piazza is powered by the creativity and the design of Stefano Seletti,” Volpetti added. “As Seletti explained on stage, he doesn’t have a 100-year history so everything he does is a reinvention of something that exists.

“This courage and reinvention are values we share. With IQOS, we reinvented a category that has existed for more than 100 years. This is the kind of reinvention we wanted to portray with this project.”

IQOS Curious X

According to Volpetti, the SELETTI collaboration is only the beginning of PMI’s mission to challenge the status quo. He explained, “The Curious X: Sensorium Piazza is only the first step. We are ramping this up by collaborating with 20 global artists and designers that push the boundaries of creativity and curiosity.

“We challenged them to think about objects and experiences differently. We started in Milan and we will conclude in Milan to show the results of the campaign and an exciting new launch in the autumn.”

While Volpetti and PMI Global Travel Retail Vice President Beste Ermaner kept the launch plans for IQOS Curious X close, they revealed that the campaign will be a major focus for PMI in 2025, both in domestic markets and in travel retail. 

Volpetti said, “This is a global project which we will be broadly communicating across our retail stores, digital assets and communities. We will not only engage IQOS consumers with the platform, but also the wider demographic of adult smokers and nicotine users.

“It’s important that we communicate this project because it represents the essence of the brand. It will be an important part of our campaigns and our repertoire of communications across the year.”

Offering the travel retail point of view, Ermaner added: “Now that we have revealed this initiative in the Italian market, we will work with our trade partners to further boost the awareness for this platform in travel retail; because ultimately travel retail and domestic markets reach the same consumers.

“In travel retail, we are simply hosting the domestic markets’ adult consumers for a couple of hours,” she added. “It’s very important that we create one holistic consumer journey starting from the domestic market, continuing at the airport and all the way to their destinations.

“This is the role that we will play to make sure consumers have an omnichannel experience pre-, during and post-journey.”

Challenging the status quo of the tobacco industry

As one of the world’s largest tobacco companies, PMI’s mission of creating a smoke-free future is one that undoubtedly challenges the status quo.

Speaking on PMI’s smoke-free journey so far, Volpetti said: “This notion of challenging the status quo is what made us the company we are today. We now have over 32 million adult smokers that switched to IQOS, of which two-thirds have left cigarettes completely behind. It’s clear that smoke-free alternatives such as IQOS are the better choice for smokers that want to continue using nicotine and we believe they are the future.

“The genesis of all that curiosity,” he added, “is the curiosity of PMI to completely reinvent a category, but also the curiosity of the smokers to completely change their habits.”

For Ermaner, travel retail plays an ever-important role in making PMI’s smoke-free future a reality, particularly in the expansion of its multi-category smoke-free products portfolio. She explained, “We are present in 166 markets with our nicotine products and in 66 markets with IQOS.

“We already have our multi-category smoke-free products portfolio present across 20 markets and we are aiming to reach above 40 markets by the end of this year.

“It’s not just about opening up new locations and markets. What is more important for us moving forward is to expand our multi-category smoke-free portfolio. We have very good progress so far, with more to come by the end of this year.”

Travel retail, according to Ermaner , is a chance to engage with a large demographic of adult nicotine users and build awareness for PMI’s multi-category portfolio and smoke-free mission through premium brand experiences.

She explained, “Beyond that, our other key strategic priorities are executional excellence and creating an impactful presence in key strategic airports. Product availability is one thing, but if you cannot showcase your product in a meaningful way then it doesn’t have as big of an impact.

“This is why we are putting our focus beyond just product availability and this is what we are doing with our phenomenal multi-category presence at Geneva, Dubai and Doha airports, for example. We also have a impactful presence in Japan and Korea with IQOS.

“Product goes hand-in-hand with experience and that is what we wanted to showcase with the Curious X: Sensorium Piazza here at Milan Design Week.”

This fundamental shift from a transactional business to an experience-led business is an important one for PMI in travel retail. According to Ermaner, this shift was further reinforced by the division’s rebranding from PMI Duty Free to PMI Global Travel Retail.

“This transition actually started a while back, because it symbolises the move from a transactional business model to a much more brand-focused and experience-focused business model. The name change is just complementing this mindset shift,” she explained. “Travel retail is the window to the world. It’s a fantastic platform to build the awareness of our brands, amplify our platforms and showcase new offers. This is what we are trying to communicate with our new name.”

A long-term vision and the role of travel retail

For a company such as PMI to commit to a smoke-free future is a big statement of intent and the culmination of a long-term vision at PMI. Volpetti said, “Even in a company of 80,000 employees around the world, these types of changes are the result of the visionary courage of very few people. These visionaries conceived this vision even before the year 2000.

“We commercialised IQOS, the first smoke-free device, in 2014 and we are now in year 11 since that launch. We have invested more than US$14 billion to the development, assessment and commercialisation of our smoke-free products.

“Our vision is that by 2030 we will have more than two-thirds of our revenue generated from our smoke-free products. Today, 40% of our total revenues comes from our smoke-free products. In the first ten years of our journey, we went from zero to 40% and that figure will be two-thirds of our entire revenue by 2030. It is amazing what was born from the dream that those visionaries had all those years ago.”

Elaborating on why she believes that travel retail can be a driver for PMI’s smoke-free future mission, Ermaner said: “Firstly, consumers are extremely open to explore new products, new opportunities, new experiences in travel retail context. They are very curious and travel retail is all about curiosity.

“Secondly, the travel retail environment is a much more premium environment, which means that we are offering much more premium experiences to our consumers.

“Lastly, the scale and speed of our deployment in terms of amplifying the awareness of our new product offers and also our new brand platforms, such as IQOS Curious X, is second to none in travel retail. Curious X is going to be a great opportunity to further amplify consumer awareness and elevate the IQOS experience in travel retail.”

For a smoker to move from the analogue experience of a cigarette to a tech-driven device such as IQOS is a big change and betting on that requires a deep understanding of the evolving needs of the adult nicotine user. This is where PMI’s multi-category portfolio of smoke-free alternatives can play a big role, Ermaner said.

“We are the leader in the ‘heat not burn’ category with IQOS. However, consumers and their needs are evolving and there is no longer one single product which can fulfill their needs.

“We need to offer a variety of less harmful options for those who want to switch from cigarettes,” she added. “That is why we are focusing on our multi-category portfolio with IQOS in heat not burn, ZYN nicotine pouches and our e-cigarette VEEV.

“This is the most important milestone for PMI Global Travel Retail. Why? Because this is one of the most important platforms to grow awareness of our multi-category portfolio and drive our mission of creating a smoke-free future.”

Meet Beste Ermaner Part of the PMI family since 2001, Beste Ermaner has held key roles across Türkiye, Russia and the Operations Center, with expertise spanning consumer insights, marketing, sales, global brand innovation and reduced-risk products (RRP). Ermaner assumed the role of PMI Global Travel Retail Vice President in March 2024 with a remit to advance the development of a multi-category duty-free organisation. Can you tell us more about your journey with PMI so far? I like to say that I was born in PMI, because PMI is my first and only company throughout my career. I joined when I was 21 years old and am already close to 24 years in the company. I’m Turkish, so I joined within Philip Morris Turkey first, but then I had various different assignments all over the world, including Russia and Switzerland where our headquarters is located. I took over as head of the global travel retail business just one year ago. What has that transition been like? Travel retail is an amazing business, and I think the most beautiful part is the global footprint. For the first time, I’m responsible for PMI in the whole world because PMI Global Travel Retail covers 166 markets. Travel retail offers huge scale. It is a channel which reaches more than 350 million adult nicotine users. We call it the “window to the world” because it offers fantastic opportunities in terms of brand building and delivering compelling consumer experiences. Those are the parts that I love about my job because I’m a marketeer by background.