Blow Smoke to Women: how tobacco industry opens up women's market by advertising.

Authors Avatar

Blow Smoke to Women: how tobacco industry opens up women’s market by advertising

ABSTRACT

It is an overview of how the tobacco industry recruits new smokers and enhance brand loyalty by the techniques of targeting of women in tobacco advertising and promotion – in particular, the heavy concentration of cigarette advertisements in women magazines in which tobacco-related health information flow is often limited.

This paper also examines how the advertisers used the rhetoric and imagery to lure women all over the world into destructive addiction.

Introduction

In the 19th century, smoking by women in North America and Europe had long been associated with loose morals. Women smokers were viewed as fallen women, with smoking the occupational symbol of prostitution (Greaves 1996). However, the profound impact of First World War enhanced the emancipation of women and increased the prevalence of smoking among women. During the war, many women had not only taken on “male” occupations but had also started to wear trousers, play sports, cut their hair, and smoke (Waldron 1991). Subsequently, attitudes towards women smoking began to change, and more and more women started to use the cigarette as a weapon to challenge traditional ideas about female behaviours.

The tobacco companies seized this opportunity in the 1920s and 1930s to exploit ideas of liberation, power and other important values for women to recruit them to the cigarettes market. The Lucky Strike campaign “Reach for Lucky instead of a sweet” of 1925 was one of the first media campaigns geared toward women. Women were encouraged to buy cigarettes as a fat free way to satisfy hunger and as a “torch of freedom”. The message was highly effective and led smoking to be more common among women.

The marketing has become more aggressive since Virginia Slims launched a campaign with the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby.” in 1967. The strategy in creating Virginia Slims was to produce a brand that not just appealed to women, but that had a distinct identity as a women’s cigarette. After its huge success, women-oriented tobacco advertising has been getting more intense and more distinct to hook women on nicotine.

The Major Marketing Strategies of Targeting Women

--The Use of Women Magazines

Women’s magazines are one of the main ways that the tobacco industry uses to target women. They are regarded as a selective medium for reaching and targeting audience. In addition to selectivity, magazines offer advertisers excellent reproduction quality, long message life, and the opportunity for readers to get involved with both the editorial content and advertising. Women’s magazines somehow lend the advertisements some social acceptability or stylish impression because of the image of the magazine. As the health editor of British Vogue stated, the publication of an advertisement in her magazine was “as good as a stamp of acceptability” (Amos 1997).

According to some studies, magazines that took tobacco advertising were less likely to have given any major coverage to health issues related to smoking. Warner and colleagues (1992) conducted a statistical analysis of a sample of 99 U.S. magazines. The probability of women’s magazines publishing an article on the risk of smoking in a given year was 11.7 percent for those that did not carry cigarette advertisements, as compared with 5 percent for those that did publish such advertisements. Besides, Whelan (1996) conducted an analysis of issues of 13 women’s magazines from the year 1996. While she found that “a substantial portion of editorial content was devoted to disease-prevention advice, not one magazine carried a feature story on preventing lung cancer” nor on several other categories of women-related health problems connected to smoking (p.17).

Join now!

Critics believe that the tobacco industry frequently interferes with the flow of information regarding the deleterious physiological consequences of tobacco use (Warner 1985). They suggest that the editorial staffs of magazines and newspapers are pressured by the fear of losing advertising revenue and are therefore reluctant to include negative content in their publications which might offend tobacco interest. The fear of the loss of revenue is exacerbated by the diversification of the tobacco industry which now owns a wide variety of other companies which in turn also advertise (Chapmen 1986). Many women rely on women magazines for information about ...

This is a preview of the whole essay