Generally, the tobacco industry advertises cigarette smoking the whole year-round. However, most tobacco companies tend to allot most of their annual marketing budget to the first month of the year. Did you ever wonder why?
One of the main reasons tobacco companies focus on advertising in January is because many people attempt to quit smoking in January as part of their New Year’s resolution.
What are the Effects of Tobacco Marketing?
The tobacco industry has frequently claimed that ads are only about brand preference, persuading existing users to shift to and settle for their preferred brand. Despite that, there is enough proof that advertising causes more people to become and stay addicted.
The efficacy of tobacco advertising in improving the consumption of tobacco products is widely documented. Advertisements influence new people to turn into an addiction, especially when they are minors. These advertisements also prevent established smokers from quitting.
When opposing the regulation of nicotine marketing and other tobacco control measures, advertising does its job way better by providing a good image for the nicotine industry and lowering the criticism for its youth users and community groups.
By portraying the industry as actively sharing the target audience’s values, they publicized the industry’s charity works and sports sponsorship well with publicity costing up to ten times the cost of the publicized act. Doing this also gives an excellent impression to the industry as a responsible company. (Source: National Center for Biotechnology Information)
What are Some of the Techniques Used in Tobacco Marketing?
The tobacco industry uses a variety of distinct techniques while often using multiple methods simultaneously. 1999-2000 the Find Your Voice campaign ad was reprehended as offensive to smokers who have lost their voices due to throat cancer. They target minority women and seek to associate themselves with empowerment, independence, self-seeking, women’s rights, and sexual allure. (Source: National Center for Biotechnology Information)
Rebellion
Tobacco marketing creates comprehensive usage of reactance, the sense that one is being unreasonably controlled. Reactance usually encourages rebellion in manners or opinion, which establishes that the power was ineffective, restoring the feeling of freedom. (Source: T and F Online)
Social Conformity
Despite products being sold as individualistic and non-conventional, individuals typically begin using them due to coequal intimidation. Being presented with a cigarette is one of the most considerable threat aspects of smoking. Fellows with an increased capacity for social conformity or in other words, peer pressure is also more likely to start smoking. (Source: Permanent Access)
Mood Changes
Tobacco marketing is also publicized as adequate for nerves, crankiness, and anxiety. Furthermore, advertisements have shifted from expressive claims Never gets on your nerves to implied claims slow down or pleasure up.
Although tobacco products temporarily reduce nicotine withdrawal manifestation, a dependence generates more harmful pressure and temper due to temperate pullback signs between hits. Nicotine addicts rely on nicotine to temporarily feel normal.
Nicotine dependence appears to deteriorate mental health concerns, while industry dealing delivers proclaimed that nicotine is both slightly toxic and healing for individuals with the cognitive conditions and is a state of “self-care.”
Marketing holds likewise revealed that retiring will aggravate instead than enhance mental health manifestation. This insistence enclose stood criticized by separate experimenters as faulty. (Source: National Center for Biotechnology Information)