Tobacco Marketing Genius – Part II
July 21st, 2011How do you market a product that can’t be marketed? Through warning labels of course.
This brilliant warning label can be now found in ciggy packs in the Hong Kong market. It’s a class example of “things everyone can learn from tobacco marketers”. There are few things that make this an amazing tactic.
1) The image that stands out is that of an youthful beauty and perfect complexion of the woman in the front, thus sending a message which is totally contradictory to the warning text
2) Courtesy of my wonderful head of research Debbie Ko, I’ve learned that Asians respond well to health messages that are related to their collective responsibility (for example becoming a burden to their family) and badly to messages that are related to individual  responsibility
3) In a Greater China market, using such images have a strong element of nostalgia, and even Don Draper loves a bit of nostalgia
4) Similar look n feel (of the woman) was used for decades by the Chinese tobacco industry to advertise cigarettes (who doesn’t love a bit of blush on a woman’s cheek)
While it’s undeniably clear that the tobacco marketers are geniuses, how stupid does the regulator have to be in order for something like this to slip through. Or how corrupt.
Assuming based on the soaring revenues of the big tobacco (minus Philip Morris who went through a series of corporate re-structure) the labels are not stopping people from smoking, or new smokers from picking it up. So in a sense this is positive progress, I’m sure all the non-smokers rather see beautiful Chinese woman in the labels opposed to a malformed fetus.
Now that tobacco ads are gone from F1 Grand Prix (pitstop babes) for good, and all we have left are the tobacco hostess in their short skirts venturing the nights reminding casual smokers and quitters about the delights of cigarettes, it’s refreshing to see more beauty find its way back to tobacco.
Love the ad campaign. When things are too frightening, people tend to dismiss the message. That’s why dead fetuses on cartons and gangrene limbs do little to scare people, just sort of associate mild disgust with the carton itself. Why doesn’t this work? people can’t see how that affects them. men don’t care about their unborn fetuses that they won’t have in their nonexistent uterus. how many people even see gross limbs on smokers?
I would say that this ad is even more powerful for the asian market because a small nuance to my research on culturally appropriate health persuasive messages is that because collectivistic cultures do put so much importance on relationships, when they think that they will damage it irreparably, it can be TOO frightening. so in this case, highlighting a negative outcome to relationships may be too threatening (especially if there is irreparable damage or mortality), in which case, for hong kong smokers, this won’t help. Something less threatening, but still important, like their looks, is mildly scary enough that i think it would work.
Because relationships are so central though, this means that anytime you show a product can promote harmonious relationships in Asian cultures, it will be more appealing. Any time you show that a product brutally destroys relationships, it will scare off Asian customers. I’m sure there are exceptions but if we were to go by a heuristic, i’d take that one.
From Dr Debbie, on July 21, 2011.