Stop the Press: Tobacco Companies Designed Cigarettes For Consumers Based on Research Says New Study

In what only can be described as stating the incredibly obvious, the Harvard School of Public Health unveiled a comprehensive study indicating that cigarette companies actually conducted market research on consumer behavior and then tried to create products that conformed to the results. To anyone other than a grant-seeking non-real-life-living organism, these results smack of the painfully obvious. Does anyone really think that with the billions and billions of dollars made and spent by these companies that no one in marketing ever investigated why different classes of consumers smoke (segmented on race, income, region, gender, IQ, age, and so forth)? Even more surprising to these researchers was the fact that the goal of these marketing efforts was to increase the number of smokers. (gasp!). The press release announcing the study reads like something either from
The Onion or Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Here is an redacted version of their release:

Boston, MA –A new analysis of tobacco industry documents provides evidence that cigarette companies intentionally modified their products to promote female smoking by emphasizing attributes they knew would appeal to women - stylishness and taste, as well as perceived health benefits. According to the authors, the study presents particularly troubling implications for world health, as tobacco companies seek to increase smoking among women in developing countries.

Previous studies demonstrated that marketing strategies have contributed to the association of smoking with appealing attributes including female liberation, glamour, success and thinness. Until now, however, the role of product design in targeting cigarettes to address how and why women smoke was less well understood.

“These internal documents reveal that the tobacco industry’s targeting of women goes far beyond marketing and advertising,” says lead author Carrie Murray Carpenter, M.S., Research Analyst, Tobacco Control Research and Training Program, Harvard School of Public Health. Carpenter and colleagues reveal that, for more than 20 years, the industry undertook a major effort to identify gender-based differences in motivational factors, smoking patterns, and product preferences in order to promote smoking among women and girls.

The Carpenter team say the resulting products exploited mistaken health notions about the relative safety of light cigarettes; created false perceptions of social and health effects through reduced sidestream smoke, appearance and odor and improved aroma and aftertaste; matched female taste preferences through flavored, smooth and mild-tasting cigarettes; and targeted physiological and inhalation differences between women and men with greater ease of draw, increased sensory pleasure and altered tar and nicotine levels. The documents also show that cigarette makers went so far as to explore the use of appetite suppressants in cigarettes to promote smoking-mediated weight control, according to the researchers.

“Carpenter and her group reveal that cigarette designs and ingredients were manipulated to make the cigarettes more palatable to women and to complement advertising allusions of smooth, healthy, weight-controlling, stress-reducing smoke,” according to an accompanying editorial in ADDICTION by Jack E. Henningfield, Ph.D. and colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “For example, so called ‘light’ and ‘reduced tar’ cigarettes were designed to undermine prevention and cessation efforts by addressing smokers’ concerns about the health effects of smoking — but not by reducing the adverse health effects.” Henningfield, who serves as director of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Innovators Combating Substance Abuse program at Johns Hopkins University, is Adjunct Professor of Behavioral Biology, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the university’s School of Medicine.

The documents reveal that, beginning in the 1970s, the companies undertook internal research to identify numerous psychological and behavioral factors contributing to female-specific needs and motivations to smoke. As brand preferences shifted between the 1970s and 1990s the tobacco companies modified their product designs accordingly. “While the tobacco industry continues to target female smokers today, their current strategies are more multi-faceted and less readily identifiable than they were decades ago,” the authors note.

The new paper’s analysis suggests that the tobacco industry’s behavior has particularly troubling implications for health officials in the developing world. While male smoking rates are declining throughout the world, female smoking rates are expected to continuing increasing and reach 20 percent by 2025, driven by the growth of female markets in developing countries. Published research predicts the rapid growth of tobacco-related disease among women in these countries, and establishes that industry efforts to target women have resulted in the elevated female smoking and related disease rates that we see today.

Seemingly lost on the Harvard research team is that in the real world, companies conduct research on customers and then design and market products to them. Maybe this doesn’t happen very much in academic research … hence their surprise and dismay in the findings.

Technorati Tags: smoking, tobacco

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 at 8:19 pm by Insider and is filed under Funny ... to us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.