Sex, Muscle and Smokes
What are the tobacco barons to do? Cancer and heart disease are killing off their best customers, every year more people are giving up cigarettes or, wisely, choosing not to start, and steady tax hikes are making a pack of smokes more expensive for those still puffing away. The folks who make cigarettes are getting desperate to hang on to the dwindling number of customers.
Sex has always worked to sell cigarettes. So enter the Kool Vending Female, as she’s officially known. With her fire-engine-red lipstick, come-hither voice and brown locks, this virtual vixen purrs from the video screen of a new generation of cigarette vending machines. Press the button for Marlboro or Camel cigarettes and the Kool Vending Female coos, “Lucky Strikes are delicious. Toasted and delicious, and I’ll give you a pack for 75 cents off.”
Brown & Williamson Tobacco is testing these new machines in selected cities. Kool Vending Female and her companion, a guy with a black goatee, accept only credit cards, and through a microprocessor scan of each customer’s driver’s license to verify the buyer’s age, they are supposed to prevent sales to underage individuals.
The company of course hopes the machines will boost vending machine sales. The vending machines record the brands that customers buy, although Brown & Williamson says it won’t keep their names. Repeat customers will get buy-one-get-one-free deals and other discounts.
When sex doesn’t work, the cigarette makers haven’t been shy about taking a page from Tony Soprano’s book. Over the last 20 years, according to a new study, the tobacco conglomerates pressured some drug companies, themselves part of giant corporations, to limit their marketing of nicotine gum and skin patches that help smokers quit. The Journal of the American Medical Assn., in its current issue, documents how Philip Morris, maker of Marlboro and Virginia Slims brands, threatened to end its purchases from Dow Chemical of a chemical used to moisten tobacco unless Dow’s subsidiary at the time, Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, eliminated anti-tobacco statements from its ads for Nicorette gum.
The industry has hardly renounced that bare-knuckles approach. As New York City considers a restaurant smoking ban, two restaurant trade magazines recently accepted ads supporting the move. Editors at those two magazines soon got e-mail from Philip Morris asking whether they would run the ads and insinuating that it would base its own advertising decisions on the answers. The anti-smoking ads were later rejected.
The more things change, the more they stay the same--including, apparently, the belief by tobacco executives that the only thing worse than a dead smoker is an ex-smoker.
