I had an interesting conversation with my regular courier
driver. Leaning up against the back of his truck, he took a long drag on a
cigarette and explained to me how he had been smoking since he was 14 years old.
I would guess that he is about 60 now. He told me he wished he could quit, but
he was clearly addicted to nicotine and had been most of his life. He lamented
that while he was growing up, no one outside of fundamentalist evangelical
Protestant churches were talking about the dangers of cigarette smoking.
"Everyone did it. My sports heroes, movie stars, my teachers, even the
president and first lady were smokers.”
How do you impact culture in a way that makes it do an about
face? Marketing is charged with shaping the opinions of people to purchase a
product or a service, to feel good about a company, a brand, an industry;
craving one thing and rejecting another. There is no better example of this
than the marketing of cigarettes. The culture that grew up in the first half of
the twentieth century was marketed to embrace smoking as debonair, strong,
relaxing and even healthy. In the late 1950s, studies began to link cigarette
smoking to cancer. In 1964, the US Surgeon General came out with the first of several
warnings linking cigarette smoking to major health risks. Of course there is
nothing at all debonair, strong, relaxing or especially nothing healthy about a
lung cancer victim struggling for a breath of air. It took many years, but the
culture shifted in the way it viewed cigarettes. There was a stigma that was
attached to cigarette smoking and this message changed drastically. It happened
the same way that tobacco companies had attracted people to smoking in the
first place: it took marketing.
When you have a strong marketing message, it has a grand
impact on the way people think. Attitudes shift. When you are marketing well,
you impact this shift. In my generation, one of the most successful cigarette
campaigns was that of the Marlboro Man. It is amazing that just the mention of
a brand of cigarettes coupled with Man conjures
up the images of the independent cowboy that so appealed to men. Smoking was a
willful act of an independent man. No one was going to tell the Marlboro Man to
put out his cigarette or he wouldn’t be served in a restaurant. He would just
cook beans over an open fire and smoke on his own. When the first campaigns
against smoking began in the 60s, this was just the argument that those on the
side of smoking made against their rivals. Leave us alone, we are
freedom-loving citizens who will smoke when and where we like. Those in charge
of Philip Morris’ marketing efforts had to be smiling. They had not just
created a spokesman for their product, they had shaped the attitudes of their
customers. In shifting attitudes, the anti-smoking marketing appealed to this
sense of liberty and challenged it. They claimed that big tobacco companies had
made slaves of its customers, not liberated them. They vilified these
corporations. They claimed that they solicited children to smoke by advertising
directly to them in their early teens. The anti-smoking campaign used this to
get smoking ads and sponsorships banned, first from TV, then from sporting
events, then from billboards, and so on. After taking away these mediums of
advertising, the anti-smoking campaigns then used these very mediums to shout
their message even louder. In this way, they used very powerful marketing tools
to turn the public’s perception of smoking. In the book, Smoke: A
Global History of Smoking, the authors
state, "Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of smoking is not that it
is stigmatized, but rather that it seems to have changed its place in society
significantly. What once was behavior touted as a sign of gentility and
sophistication is now portrayed as foolish and unkempt.”* The anti-smoking
marketers made a very strong statement by using the very same pitchmen who
pedaled cigarettes years earlier to now pitch a different message. Before he
died of lung cancer, Yul Brynner did a TV commercial where he stated, "Now that
I'm gone, I tell you: Don't smoke, whatever you do, just don't smoke.” Even the
Marlboro Man, Wayne McLaren, did an anti-smoking campaign just before his death
at age 51, juxtaposing photos of himself as the strong Marlboro Man with film
of him lying in his hospital bed after the removal of a lung and chemotherapy
had reduced him to a shell of his former self.
Marketing can turn the tide of cultural attitudes. Don’t
underestimate the message you are making in your campaigns.
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* Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun. Reaktion Books,
London. p. 348.
Who will pay tobaccos toll? By Mary J. Loftus. Public Health Magazine, Spring 2002
From "Mild as May" to "Tough as Shoe Leather" http://www.xroads.virginia.edu/~class/marlboro/mman2.html
Photo by Geotrac