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Cigarette Seduction: Deconstructing its Siren Appeal to Teen Smokers--by Alan Brody. A CompuServe Public Health Forum Conference

Each element of the brand, the cigarette, the filter and the packaging has meaning and we can examine the emotional trail of each and every smoker based on the story of their initiation and their subsequent brand choices.

Cigarette Seduction:

Deconstructing its Siren Appeal to Teen Smokers

by Alan Brody

The cigarette business is full of paradoxes.

• There are fewer smokers yet the surviving cigarette companies have gotten richer, more powerful and less fearful of new competitors.
• There are fewer advertising venues for tobacco companies yet the adscontinue to be as potent as ever.
• Smoke cessation solutions like nicotine patches and nicotine gum may save thousands of lives and work as de facto anti-cigarette commercials but they also have the perverse effect of informing teens that even if smoking is addictive, it is revocable--thus lowering their barrier to entry.
• As fewer adult males smoke more women pick up the smoldering baton. €In a culture permeated by media that is against smoking, its new, smarter and more aware teen generation has adopted smoking with a renewed fervor.

The only way to resolve these dilemmas is to understand the precise role of cigarette in the adult-formation of our youth. It is a vestigial initiation rite--one present in all cultures but long ignored by our industrialized selves--until it was gratefully embraced by the most sophisticated cigarette companies beginning with Marlboro. How this came about and what this means to smoking is critical because it enables us to understand the magic of the smoke and the payoff of the brand as reduced to a basic psychological language. Each element of the brand, the cigarette, the filter and the packaging have meaning and we can examine the emotional trail of each and every smoker based on the story of their initiation and their subsequent brand choices.

Cigarette Seduction will discuss how to unravel the smoking mystique inherent in the brand before the eyes of a new generation of inductees. By deconstructing its "payoff" and tracing its adoption through word-of-mouth and imitation we can develop a body of ideas to encounter the new wave of cigarette advertising and marketing: themes of quiet defiance and renewed alliances with "time-honored tradition."

It is no accident that the most successful brands are the ones that most adequately address the initiation process. It is also no coincidence that the market researchers who helped revolutionize post-WWII advertising were steeped in cultural anthropology because it is the same process--understanding the creation myth--that enables us to deconstruct the spell of this smoking phenomenon.

Cigarette Seduction will discuss how to unravel the smoking mystique inherent in the brand before the eyes of a new generation of inductees

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Alan Brody: Bio

Alan Brody is a journalist and new media marketer who has been a columnist for Advertising Age Creativity, ADWEEK's Marketing Computers and MacWEEK. Like the great cigarette marketers the Ruperts of Rothmans International, he is originally South African which may explain his anthropological approach to the cigarette question.

Brody began his career as a student of the post-WWII motivational researchers--a group of psychoanalytically and anthropologically oriented psychologists--that provided Madison Avenue with the background to their great ad campaigns and brand-building efforts. Out of that he discovered the peculiar relationship between the four main brands that teenagers initiate on (Marlboro, Camel, Virginia Slims and Newport) and the symbolic meaning of the brands themselves.

This study fist appeared as a paper entitled "Cigarette Semiotics" which was delivered at the annual Popular Culture Association convention in Toronto in 1984.

The defining brand then, as it is now, was Marlboro. Back in the 70's, 70% of white males teenagers initiated with it. Today, that number is around 75%. With teen girls, the initiating brand of choice is Virginia Slims. In the 80's, a now-released marketing study for RJ Reynolds identified the importance of this phenomenon and encouraged them to focus on Camels, which became a leading contender in the youth initiation market by using a cartoon Camel and focusing on what Brody had identified in his study as the underlying appeal of Camel: it had always has been perceived by smokers as a penis.

Brody claims that his research on Marlboro led him to develop the concept that was "purloined" by the ad agency developing the Barclay brand. Fortunately, the brand proved unsuccessful because it ignored the youth initiation market and his analysis of the lure of Marlboro's pack: it most resembles a medal and in its first seven years with tattooed men, anticipated the latter 20th century's regression into tribal marking and scarification..

Based on texts from his own work "Cigarette Semiotics" and commentary on the works of Ernest Dichter (whose 1947 paper "Why We Smoke Cigarettes" is readily available on the internet), Louis Cheskin (who worked on the research behind Marlboro's packaging) and the key cigarette literature ranging from Wagner's "Cigarette Country" to Kluger's "Ashes to Ashes," Hilts' "Smokescreen" & Klein's "Smoking is Sublime" this discussion will open door to the "strategy of smokers' desire" and what you can tell about them from their choice of brands.

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