Boyz to (Marlboro) Men
Rugged machismo is apparently not the key to the success of Marlboro's cowboy. The "secret" RJR report, now available on the World Wide Web, says young Marlboro smokers are actually less interested in traditional, rugged masculinity than are smokers of other brands. The Marlboro success apparently comes from the sense of quiet rebellion against constraints and rules and from a sense of belonging (to the tribe of Marlboro smokers). The RJR report says it could be that "as social pressures tend to isolate younger adult smokers from their nonsmoking peers, they have an increased need to identify with their smoking peers, to smoke the 'belonging' brand."
Here we have arrived at the central problem of the antismoking campaign. The cigarette companies are selling a sense of belonging and psychological self-control in a society in which nobody seems to belong anymore, except tribally by skin color or gender. All the antismoking lobby has to sell is the rational health findings of an advanced technological society and the high probability of a longer lifetime, which the young translate as a chance to die at age 81 instead of 77. Worse, the cigarette companies are selling rule breaking and freedom from adult authority, which the antismoking-lobby world thinks it can combat by creating more rules and laws.
My friend Alan Brody, an antismoking marketing executive, argues that the cigarette companies have long understood that their real role in America is to address--and exploit--the psychological struggles of teenagers. He thinks the companies have shaped smoking as a powerful adult initiation ritual in a society that doesn't have one and taken the side of the young against the adult message of "Just say no." Brody wants to set aside some of the money from the proposed tobacco settlement to address coming-of-age problems and to match some of the tobacco industry's spending on psychological research. Good idea. If it happens, maybe the fight against the cigarette companies won't be such a terrible mismatch.
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