Marketing of menthol cigarettes and consumer perceptions: a review of tobacco industry documents

Abstract

Objective: To examine tobacco industry marketing of menthol cigarettes and to determine what the tobacco industry knew about consumer perceptions of menthol.

Methods: A snowball sampling design was used to systematically search the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu) between 28 February and 27 April 2010. Of the approximately 11 million documents available in the LTDL, the iterative searches returned tens of thousands of results from the major US tobacco companies and affiliated organisations. A collection of 953 documents from the 1930s to the first decade of the 21st century relevant to 1 or more of the research questions were qualitatively analysed, as follows: (1) are/were menthol cigarettes marketed with health reassurance messages? (2) What other messages come from menthol cigarette advertising? (3) How do smokers view menthol cigarettes? (4) Were menthol cigarettes marketed to specific populations?

Results: Menthol cigarettes were marketed as, and are perceived by consumers to be, healthier than non-menthol cigarettes. Menthol cigarettes are also marketed to specific social and demographic groups, including African-Americans, young people and women, and are perceived by consumers to signal social group belonging.

Conclusions: The tobacco industry knew consumers perceived menthol as healthier than non-menthol cigarettes, and this was the intent behind marketing. Marketing emphasising menthol attracts consumers who may not otherwise progress to regular smoking, including young, inexperienced users and those who find 'regular' cigarettes undesirable. Such marketing may also appeal to health-concerned smokers who might otherwise quit.

Figure 1

Spuds brand and Kool brand cigarettes, the earliest two brands to be marketed specifically as mentholated brands in the US, were presented in the 1920s and 1930s as brands that provide relief from the throat pain and irritation caused by smoking (images retrieved from http://lane.stanford.edu/tobacco/index.html).

Figure 2

Triggered by the health scare of the 1950s and increasing after the 1964 US Surgeon General's Report, advertisements for menthol brands emphasised general refreshment and coolness rather than the explicit health messages of earlier decades. Menthol nevertheless continued to carry the medicinal and health connotations of previous decades (images from the 1980s, retrieved from http://www.tobacco.org/ads).

Figure 3

This 2003 Newport advertisement communicates fun-loving youthfulness and sociability, as well as in-group belonging (African–Americans in an urban bar scene). The ‘Alive with Pleasure’ slogan of the 1990s is here replaced with simply ‘Pleasure’, further removing the campaign explicit health claims while continuing in the theme of the previous campaign that includes the health-suggestive word ‘Alive’ (image retrieved from http://www.trinketsandtrash.org).