Tobacco advertising geared toward women

Tobacco advertising geared toward women began in the 1920s. By the mid-1930s, cigarette advertisements targeting women were becoming so commonplace that one advertisement for the mentholated Spud brand had the caption “To read the advertisements these days, a fellow’d think the pretty girls do all the smoking.” As early as the 1920s, tobacco advertising geared toward women included messages such as “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” to establish an association between smoking and slimness. The positioning of Lucky Strike cigarettes 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. Through World War II, Chesterfield advertisements regularly featured glamour photographs of a Chesterfield girl of the month, usually a fashion model or a Hollywood star such as Rita Hayworth, Rosalind Russell, or Betty Grable. The number of women aged 18 through 25 years who began smoking increased significantly in the mid-1920s, the same time that the tobacco industry mounted the Chesterfield and Lucky Strike campaigns directed at women. The trend was most striking among women aged 18 though 21. The number of women in this age group who began smoking tripled between 1911 and 1925 and had more than tripled again by 1939. In 1968, Philip Morris marketed Virginia Slims cigarettes to women with an advertising strategy showing canny insight into the importance of the emerging women’s movement. The slogan “You’ve come a long way, Baby” later gave way to “It’s a woman thing” in the mid-1990s, and more recently the “Find your voice” campaign featuring women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. The underlying message of these campaigns has been that smoking is related to women’s freedom, emancipation, and empowerment. Initiation rates among girls aged 14 though 17 years rapidly increased in parallel with the combined sales of the leading women’s-niche brands (Virginia Slims, Silva Thins, and Eve) during this period. In 1960, about 10% of all cigarette advertisements appeared in popular women’s magazines, and by 1985, cigarette advertisements increased by 34%. Women have been extensively targeted in tobacco marketing. Such marketing is dominated by themes of an association between social desirability, independence, and smoking messages conveyed through advertisements featuring slim, attractive, and athletic models. In 1999, expenditures for domestic cigarette advertising and promotion was $8.24 billion—increasing 22.3 % from the $6.73 billion spent in 1998. Advertising is used in part to reduce women’s fear of the health risks from smoking by presenting information on nicotine and tar content or by using positive images (e.g., models engaged in exercise or pictures of white capped mountains against a background of clear blue skies).