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 health issues. The lack of smoking-related health coverage in sources on which women place such reliance downplays the seriousness of the threat. In addition, the need for accurate information on the risk of this smoking in women’s magazines is critical for the teenage girls who are easily recruited by the tobacco companies.
On the other hand, there are many pictures of models smoking on fashion pages and famous people smoking in feature published in magazines. Such images can be more potent than cigarette advertisements. Cigarettes in fashion spreads validate young people’s belief that smoking is a normal part of everyday life and associate smoking with attributes that young people value.
--Physiological Aspects
Many tobacco brands tend to hook women on nicotine with two key female aspirations: being slim and attractive. As early as the 1920s, Lucky Strike’s advertisement stating “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” began establishing an association between smoking and slimness. The timing could not have been better as slimness was coming into fashion along with bobbed hair and short skirts. The positioning of Lucky Strike as an aid to weight control led to a greater than 300% increase in sales for this brand in the first year of the advertising campaign (Howe 1984). Since it is well-documented that smokers have a lower mean weight than ex-smokers and non-smokers (Byrne 1988), tobacco advertisements often imply this notion to appeal to those women with relentless desire of being slim. This makes smoking to be a way of avoiding eating, an appetite suppressant or an aid in dieting. Apparently, the appetite suppressant quality is generally given higher priority than its health hazards by women smokers. Many companies have also developed longer length, extra slim versions of popular brands in an attempt to appeal to women. The filters were designed to be white to make the cigarette appear even longer. A report showed that “the slimmer design was generally found to appeal to women, who associated the tall, slim cigarette with a tall, slim figure” (Simley 1994:622) Slim female models are often depicted smoking these “feminized” cigarettes, and copy lines tend to emphasize words such as light, slim, ultra slim, slim line, slender and long. While supposedly describing the versions of the cigarettes, these copy lines also reinforce the female perception of slimness.
Some common themes are used in cigarette advertisements to portray smoking as the habit of attractive women. For example, advertisements often feature young attractive females smoking in the company of laughing friends, with an attractive man usually in a romantic setting, or simply proclaiming her sexual allure. Tobacco companies tend to hire young models in their advertisements because of their attractiveness. From a survey conducted in United States (Denman et. al 1992), there is a negative linear relationship between perceived cigarette model age and perceived cigarette model attractiveness. Older models are viewed as less attractive than younger models.
Advertising is also used to reduce women’s fear of the health risks from smoking by presenting information on nicotine and tar content or by using positive images in the advertisement. Models engaged in exercise or pictures of white capped mountains against a background of clear blue sky are very commonplace. “My pleasure!” states a Virginia Slims ad, featuring an athletic blond woman playing boxing. Sponsorship of sports events such as the Virginia Slims Tennis championships can promote the positive, healthy image of the tobacco company besides of getting international coverage.
--Psychosocial Aspects
Another most common theme other than physiological factors is that cigarette smoking is both a passport to and a symbol of a woman’s emancipation, independence and success. In 1967, one of the major tobacco companies Philip Morris marketed the first women brand Virginia Slims cigarette to women with the slogan “You’ve come a long way, Baby”. The advertising campaign supposedly aroused echoes in the hearts of many women who were just becoming aware of the evolving women’s movement. The ads were extremely popular and the slogan quickly became a catch phrase. Virginia Slims captured 1% of the market in less than one year. Not only was the new brand an instant commercial success, but also the campaign itself was seen in the industry as a breakthrough model for marketing to women. While an ad critic held this view,
When Virginia Slims’ “You’ve come a long way, baby” bounced into the
world of advertising in 1968, it bounced most of us on our ears. The saucy,
stylish, humorous ads and commercials set a new tone in women’s product
advertising. The campaign created a daring-to-be-different, daring-to-be-
free image that made the brand stand out like Gloria Steinem in the Chicago
Bears locker room. (Robinson 1985:30)
The most well known slogan later gave way to “It’s a woman thing” in the mid-1990s, and more recently the “Find your voice” campaign featuring woman of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Similar slogans were found in other brands such as “It’s so me”, “The power of now”, “B Kool”. The underlying message of these slogans has been that smoking is related to women’s freedom, emancipation, and empowerment. This corroborates with the findings that women are more likely to use cigarettes as an emotional outlet to alleviate stress (Jacobson et al.1989, Orlandi 1987). Many women find themselves under constant pressure at home and at work. For some of them, smoking can help calm their nerves, relieve stress, and reduce feelings of anger, frustration, hostility, and aggressiveness. The employed ones often have more roles to assume than full-time homemaker---a job to perform, a boss to please, a house to run, a family to care for---and have to meet the demands, expectations and needs both at work and home, they are confronted with many role conflicts. So the women who work full time job had the highest prevalence rates of smoking.
Marketing Overseas
Despite the sophisticated advertisements, the tobacco business was hit severely by the anti-tobacco campaigns. The growing awareness of the health hazards of smoking has led to a remarkable decline in the tobacco use by both genders in western countries. Nevertheless, that does not seem to bother big tobacco companies, who are working diligently to build new markets to compensate the loss elsewhere. The companies continue to run advertisements aimed at women, but focus especially on Asian markets where rates of women smokers are much lower than they are in Western nations. A 1998 editorial in Tobacco Reporter urged its readers to look for positive in Asia where “an increasing acceptance of women smoking continues to generate new demand” (Tuintra 1998: 4). In 1967, Philip Morris associated smoking with liberation. Three decades later, the company is recycling the message for the Asian countries. Thus we could see in Japan Virginia Slims ads urging women to “Be you”, and telling Hong Kong women “You’re on your way”, while Capri ads have encouraged them to have their own option. Also in Japan, Capri advertisements have appropriated the Western life style that Japanese admire. A survey by the Japan Ministry of Health and Welfare revealed that smoking among women aged 20-29 years more than doubled between 1986 and 1999, from 10.5% to 23.2% (WHO, personal communication, 1999).
China is a particularly an interesting case. There is a vast disparity between the number of male and female smokers. In 1996, the smoking prevalence among men is 63% while only 3.8% of Chinese women smoke (Yang et al.1999). Even though the male market has been monopolized by the state owned enterprise, The China National Tobacco Corporation, China made no cigarettes specially designed for women in the past (Hui 1998). For Western tobacco makers, this represents a huge opportunity to open up a new market.
The multinational tobacco makers need to develop new social images and meanings for female smoking to overcome the association with immoral behaviour. Smoking by Chinese women had to be repositioned as not only acceptable but sociable, fashionable, stylish and feminine. Thus, the tobacco companies are recycling the messages they used in 1960s to challenge the dominant social stigma attached to female smoking in the West.
Persuading Chinese women to smoke probably is the single largest marketing opportunity in the world. That marketing opportunity, however, represents the single largest threat to public health in the world. Few American today doubt the health hazard associated with smoking while only one third of Chinese smokers are aware of its links to cancer and less than 5 percent realize that tobacco use can cause heart disease (Yang et al.1999). This is not because they cannot understand the danger, but because they simply are not being told. With the slow pace of education on the tobacco-related health risks, the rapid spread of the tobacco culture would make the smoking epidemic in China worsen especially among women.
Conclusion
Before the 20th century, people have never imagined how such a stigmatized behavior as female smoking would be transformed by the sophisticated marketing from a symbol of prostitution, into a socially acceptable and desirable practice. The change of the cultural meaning of smoking makes the habit so commonplace to women. It is a disgrace to see that women are being convinced by the advertising that using a product deadly to themselves and harmful to their children is fashionable and glamorous.
The tobacco makers not only run their business in their home countries, but also beginning digging to the world where women smoking rate is low to globalize their business and maximize the profit. The challenge facing us is how to turn down the fatal attraction in which carefully crafted marketing methods are used. One critic put it in this way,
The latest Virginia Slims Campaign asks women to “find their voice”. Yes,
indeed, we must find our voice, to confront and conquer tobacco. Many of
us may literally lose our voices, permanently, if we do not. (Healton 2000:304)
Even though the anti tobacco organizations continue to counteract the business of the tobacco companies, the companies keep launching advertising campaigns with clever marketing techniques to challenge those who challenge them. It seems likely that this conflict will intensify across the globe. The health and the well-being of women will rest on the outcome of this global opium war.
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