Picture this: Easter Sunday, 1929, New York City. The media is in a frenzy as you and several other nice looking young women defiantly parade down Fifth Avenue. You are protesting women’s inequality, but not with signs, chants, or speeches. Instead, you’ve been paid to carry a “torch of freedom.”
The torch, of course, was a Lucky Strike cigarette. It was placed in your hands by Great American Tobacco, at a time when women’s smoking was considered taboo. But while you were searching for liberation, Big Tobacco was searching for female customers. And after a slew of successful marketing campaigns—including a Phillip Morris sponsored tour teaching women how to properly smoke—it found them. Edward L. Barnays, widely regarded as the founding father of public relations, concluded, “Age old customs, I learned, could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of the media.”
The marketing gurus and tobacco companies have not stopped in their relentless and aggressive pursuit of the female smoker. They’ve surely done a good job of making those little nicotine delivering devices known as cigarettes as ubiquitous and friendly as camels and cowboys, and they’ve done an even better job of breaking down the gender divide among smokers. Though women used to lag far behind male smokers, we now make up half the adult smoking population.
But maybe that’s not enough for R.J. Reynolds, who just introduced a new cigarette for women. The new variation, Camel No.9, is decidedly feminine with pink and teal colors, a “light and luscious” slogan, and flowers encircling the cigarette packs in magazine ads. According to the senior marketing director at R.J. Reynolds, quoted in the New York Times, the new name Camel No.9 is meant to suggest “dressed to the nines, putting on your best.”
But the only ones dressing their best are the tobacco companies. They’re trying to dress up the fact that lung cancer kills more women than any other cancer, that tobacco marketing influences girls to start smoking, and that smoking kills about 178,000 U.S. women a year. Since their first assault on us in the 1920s, tobacco companies have constantly tried to dress up their image with new strategies, messages, and products to reach out to every psychosocial segment of the female gender.
Thanks to a 1998 tobacco settlement, which gave public access to insider tobacco marketing documents, researchers have been privy to information indicating just how they do this. In the article “Emotions for Sale,” a group of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed how cigarette marketing campaigns target women based on their different psychosocial needs. For instance, the brand Satin, targeted to “social strivers” and “satisfied, secure” women, was designed to “communicate to working women as well as housewives that they deserve some time for themselves; time to relax and …smoke Satin cigarettes.” For the “imprisoned smokers” and “closet smokers,” Benson and Hedges stressed social acceptability with their “For People Who Like to Smoke” campaign. For the “uptown girls” among us, Virginia Slims stressed female camaraderie with “It’s a Woman Thing.”
Other ideals portrayed in female focused campaigns have been sex appeal, adventure, affluence, independence, glamour, fantasy, and liberation. Ever since the 1920s campaign, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” marketers have long sought to link smoking and slimness, helping encourage the habit among adolescent girls and young women.
But maybe this is old news for advertisers and industry analysts. Marketing execs are just trying to figure out the best way to associate their product with an unmet psychosocial need and Camel is just putting an old product in a new costume, wanting to give adult females smokers a choice. Consumer choice, healthy competition—isn’t that what the free market is all about?
Unfortunately the free market fails miserably when it comes to tobacco. Although the industry maintains the purpose of its advertising is to increase market shares among already established smokers, this doesn’t really match with reality. Tobacco companies constantly need to recruit new smokers because their customer base has the annoying habit of prematurely dying. When people die off, new ones must be recruited. Not to mention the majority of smokers start in adolescence and once established, rarely switch brands. This means the new Camel campaign is likely targeting young women, who are on the fence between social smoking and addiction. Or perhaps they are targeting young girls, since, according the FDA, “cigarette manufacturers know that young people are vital to their market and that they need to develop advertising and other promotional activities that appeal to young people.”
