Brilliant Tobacco Marketing for Smoking Women

Tobacco marketing has a great success nowadays and it is making a very good job. Tobacco industry is genius in marketing. They have succeeded in making four generations of Americans to smoke and continue to do it. Smokers do not listen about the danger of cigarettes, only the pleasure matters. All of tobacco companies’ messages helped them accomplish their goal. The messages are targeting groups of potential buyers. The tobacco marketers are developing products to adapt to different changes in the market.

A good example could be the new brands which appeared on the international market like: Berrat cigarettes, Avalon brand, West cigarettes or Focus brand.

They have been very successful in targeting women. Kurt Fetz, from Floyd County Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Coalition, in a guest column May 21, has highlighted the effects of tobacco on women showing what reproductive problems might appear if a women is smoking.

In present more young girls are being targeted by tobacco advertise. We all know that on May 31 was World No Tobacco Day, with the support of World Health Organization the day was focused on women and young girls. In 1911, the U.S. government broke up the American Tobacco Co. monopoly and there was created other small tobacco companies. They were competing for this business. For recognizing each tobacco company in part they invented different slogans and photos. This is how people distinguished them. This is how everything began.

At that time only a few women were smoking because it was considered immoral and having bad behavior. For a woman was illegal to smoke outside. But later everything changed because the women fought for their right to vote. They won it in 1920. Soon the Lucky Strike producer recognized women as an untapped market. They have hired a woman who was a psychologist to analyze what would attract women to smoking. They have also hired a marketing representative named Edward L. Bernays to start a tobacco campaign based on the psychologist’s findings.

Edward L. Bernays has then encouraged a group of beautiful, well-dressed women to light up cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom” during the 1928 Easter Parade suggesting a protest against sexual discrimination. The tobacco company manipulated feminism with a big success. They made them a tool for tobacco marketing. Smoking represented a symbol of freedom, equality and feminine power.

Since that time, American tobacco companies have exploited feminine matters by associating their products with slimness, sex appeal, power, ethnic pride, independence, success and even athleticism. Cigarette ads targeted to women have appeared in magazines, newspapers, radio, film, television and on the Internet.

Modern marketing of tobacco includes packaging, the development of products and promotions especially for women, especially young women and girls. Virginia Slims was one of the first tobacco products designed for women. Issued in the late 1960s, the brand became famous because of its tag line, “You’ve come a long way, baby”.

In 2007, Camel No. 9, billed as “light and luscious,” in its designer glossy black pack with a bright pink foil liner was launched amid parties at bars, clubs and college campuses. Attendees have received free cigarette samples, and girlie gifts like mirror compacts, makeup-related items, jeweled lighters, bracelets and other accessories.

Tobacco marketing has, indeed, been colorful and clever— cutting edge. It became just brilliant and successful. Now almost one in six American women are smokers, and they tend to be younger women, who will possibly smoke for many years before quitting.

That’s great for tobacco companies, not so good for women. The incidence of the smoking-related diseases of heart disease, high blood pressure, chronic pulmonary disease, stroke, and lung cancer has increased along with the rise in women smokers. Lung cancer among women has increased 600 percent between 1930 and 1997, and has been the leading cause of cancer deaths among American women since 1987.

Tobacco marketing has been very successful to American women that it has now a global issue. The men remain the primary users of tobacco, tobacco use by women in many countries has increased so much having a bigger number then smoking men.

Tobacco usage is already the No. 1 cause of preventable disease and death in the United States and not only. In developing countries tobacco is brilliantly marketed to women.

A brilliant cigarette ad campaign, but…