Tobacco Marketing Leaves Women Seeing Red (Truthdig)

[marmar]

Tobacco Marketing Leaves Women Seeing Red

Posted on Apr 17, 2007
By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—We’ve come a long way from seeing ourselves as oh-so-sexy holding a slim cigarette—all the way to seeing red. Red, the color of angry outrage, could be just the thing to blot out Big Tobacco’s latest campaign to hook young women on cigarettes by dressing up death in fuchsia and teal.

It isn’t every day that an invitation to an official state event implores its participants to “Come Dressed in Black and White ... Leave Seeing Red.” But no slogan came closer to capturing the ferocity of the reaction that Indiana Health Commissioner Judy Monroe was getting from professional women around her state when they heard about R.J. Reynolds’ new Camel No. 9—a supposedly “light and luscious” cigarette the company has begun marketing aggressively to women.

The spark for Wednesday evening’s anti-tobacco networking session in Indianapolis came at a meeting among Monroe and a handful of anti-tobacco activists. The group discussed Camel No. 9’s marketing, a campaign that includes designing the package as if it were a fashion accessory, in shocking pink and electric blue—and running ads in fashion magazines that are read predominantly by young women and teens. It extends to special ladies’ “spa nights” at nightclubs that cater to the under-30 crowd, where pampering with manicures and massages are part of the push. “Right then and there we said, ‘We’ve got to do something about it,” Monroe recalled in a telephone interview.

The immediate result is a networking session for women where Monroe, Indiana first lady Cheri Daniels and other powerful women in the state are to publicize the dangers of falling for such cheap glitz. “Every time women hear this marketing strategy they are outraged,” says Monroe, a former family physician who says she’s treated patients with severe lung disease from smoking. “They all are ready to be there. I’ve had wonderful e-mails coming in from women clergy, women bishops, business leaders, of course our educators and our young women from the universities.”

More than a generation after the tobacco industry marketed Virginia Slims to newly “liberated” and upwardly mobile women, it just might find itself one-upped. Now some of the same women who were targets of that infamous ad campaign are running businesses, heading universities—and leading state governments. We’ve come all the way from believing the lie that it’s glamorous to smoke, to being furious that cigarettes are advertised in Glamour. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tobacco_marketing_leaves_women_seeing_red/

[aquart]

1. About time, ladies.

We already know it's harder for us to quit. No wonder they want to hook us young.