Tobacco marketing adds mango, consequences await flavour review
Tobacco marketing has solved its image problem. It puts nicotine in bright colours and gives it a name that sounds like a smoothie ordered under a ring light.
WHO used World No Tobacco Day to spotlight sweet flavours, glossy packaging and promotion. These can make a product with serious health risks look like a limited edition lip balm.
The industry now offers thousands of flavours across tobacco and nicotine products. Once, it used cowboys. Now, it uses mango, bubblegum and the belief that warnings become decorative beside a cheerful berry.
Fruit bowl meets public health
“Consumers deserve choice,” said Giles Vapour Trail, vice president of Plausible Fruit. “Our latest release, Strawberry Personal Responsibility, tastes like somebody else’s problem.”
Meanwhile, WHO says tobacco causes 1.1 million deaths each year in its European Region. That fact sits badly beside neon packaging. Still, marketers have put pastel colours on grimmer facts before.
Therefore, WHO wants stronger rules on flavours, packaging and promotion. Tobacco companies will treat those rules as a creative brief. Soon, a designer will pitch Limited Edition Regulatory Loophole with an icy finish.
The aim is clear. Make the product sweeter. Make the box brighter. Then make the risk easier to ignore. A fruit stall would reject that strategy for dishonesty.
Of course, nobody in a boardroom calls this a plan to disguise risk. They call it branding, which is the same thing after the consultants have selected a softer typeface and ordered fruit shaped biscuits.
Executives tested a flavour called Consequences. Nobody liked it. So they cancelled the launch. Consumers preferred mango, slogans and the belief that the packet only wanted to be their friend.
Read the real story: WHO Europe’s World No Tobacco Day campaign
