Boyz to (Marlboro) Men
Marshall Blonsky mentioned the other day that an ad agency once offered him $25,000 for two weeks' work on a tobacco account. Blonsky, a professor at New York University, is an expert on semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and other forms of communication. The agency wanted him to do a psychological profile of all American cigarette brands and their ads, "a sort of human genome project" of the mental world created by Big Tobacco. The idea was to find psychological space for a new brand.
Blonsky said no, but his story is a reminder of how hard the tobacco companies work on depth psychology. This extends to the ritual cues of smoking, right down to the satisfaction a smoker gets from crunching an empty cigarette pack and hearing the crinkle of cellophane.
Cigarette packs and their ads bristle with "visual rhetoric"--a term used by playwright Anna Deavere Smith to express the idea that words are not nearly as persuasive these days as images. Many Newport ads are filled with coded themes of sexual combat or attempts by females to eclipse the dominant males, all buried in happy scenes of outdoorsy horseplay. A decade or so ago, one brand experimented with ads showing a lot of white lines. They looked like lines of cocaine, apparently an attempt to link smoking with snorting and hipness.
Venit, vicit. Blonsky has written about Reagan-era ads for Merit filled with military imagery, thus associating the brand with the military buildup and Morning in America. Military imagery in smoking is an old story. The famous Marlboro chevron is a military insignia. Both Marlboro and Pall Mall carry military mottoes of conquering Roman emperors on every pack. One analyst thinks the Marlboro chevron hard pack subconsciously functions as a medal, which the smoker "pins on" himself each time he stuffs it in his shirt pocket. Maybe, maybe not. But don't underestimate the industry's commitment to finding powerful nonverbal hooks, particularly for young beginning smokers. A lot of psychologists are reportedly on the payroll, and rumor has it that they include child psychologists, too.
The most powerful hook so far is the Marlboro man, which the Leo Burnett agency more or less stumbled upon in the '50s while working on a series of images of men with macho-type jobs. Philip Morris's research showed that young people in search of an identity were starting to smoke to declare their independence from their parents. The idea was to harness a yearning for freedom and rebellion without making the message too antisocial. (The early Marlboro man had tattoos, a much stronger antisocial symbol then than now.)
A lot of work has gone into aping Marlboro's success (60 percent of young smokers pick Marlboro). The pre-Joe Camel ads for Camel featured a lone rugged male, clearly a Marlboro imitator. Canada's Imperial Tobacco mocked this Camel man because he "does not show feelings, excludes women, and isn't concerned about society." However, Imperial agreed with the selling theme of "nobody to interfere, no boss/parents."
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