Shaping Retail: Targeting Specific Communities

The tobacco industry uses point of sale (POS) marketing strategies in the retail environment to promote their products to consumers, often targeting specific communities using tailored marketing techniques such as package design. In this article we highlight the retail marketing strategies used by the tobacco industry to target consumers based on their identity, including age, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

The industry does this by, for example, signing contracts with retailers that incentivise promoting products to specific groups of people by discounting certain products and placing them prominently in stores.¹

• For details see Shaping Retail: The Role of Incentives

Age

Retail marketing targets young consumers using a range of appealing techniques. Internal industry documents show that young people “are considered a key market segment and that marketing strategies have been designed to address them directly”.²

Retailers may place tobacco products close to other sugary products and snacks, which appeal to children.³ For example in Colombia “appealing and well-lit displays of tobacco products are usually located very close to candy and other items targeted for children and youth.”² Tobacco companies also design eye-catching advertising stands, such as “Power walls,” which use bright lights and colour schemes to draw attention to the cigarette packs displayed, ⁴ a practice associated with increased smoking risk among adolescents.⁵

Product design can also influence uptake by young consumers. Flavoured products, such as capsule cigarettes that release concentrated flavour when squeezed, are particularly appealing to children.³ For more information see Flavoured and Menthol Tobacco

Retailers also use gifts or other purchasing incentives to increase the appeal of cigarette packs. For example:

• In Belgium in 2007 Imperial Tobacco supplied retailers with a wooden block game similar to Jenga to hand out at their discretion. The game, named Blokken, was similar in packaging appearance to Imperial’s Bastos cigarettes, which were sold in the same shops.⁶
• An investigation in 2019 revealed that tobacco vendors in India were offering school children various incentives to smoke, including free tobacco products. Investigators observed this practice at over 30% of sellers, mostly street vendors, many near schools.⁷

Some retailers in LMICs sell single cigarette sticks that are more affordable for youth.³ These strategies are also likely to be employed at retailers close to schools and other areas with high numbers of children.³

• For more on this tactic see Tobacco Industry Targeting Young People

Age-based retail marketing does not exclusively target young people. Industry documents show that US tobacco companies in the 1990’s systematically targeted older people to encourage cigarette purchasing, for example by employing “Couponing initiatives and giveaways at nursing homes[…]”.⁸

Within the context of tobacco industry promotion of e-cigarettes, one US study found that some e-cigarette marketing is also targeted in specific ways to older generations, for example by appealing to nostalgia, using golden age style marketing imagery featuring bowling alleys and diners.⁹

Targeting Specific Ethnicities

The tobacco industry has been accused of targeting different racial groups. Much of the research investigating retail strategies and race has taken place in the US, where one study found that  “tobacco retailers concentrate disproportionately in neighborhoods with a higher proportion of Black and Latino or Hispanic residents as well as neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status[…]”¹⁰

U.S. tobacco companies heavily market menthol cigarettes in predominantly Black neighbourhoods, offering the product at low prices and ensuring wide availability among local retailers.¹¹¹ The companies use zip (area) codes to identify retailers in neighbourhoods with higher populations of people who are “young, black, relatively low income and education.”¹² A study in California found that retail stores near schools with a larger population of Black students were more likely to market menthol cigarettes.¹² As a result of these tobacco industry marketing strategies, 81 percent of  Black American smokers use menthol cigarettes, in contrast to 34 percent of White smokers.¹³ For more information see Racism and the Tobacco Industry.

The trend of higher tobacco availability, or lower pricing, in neighbourhoods with a high proportion of different racial groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged people is not limited to the US.¹⁰ This pattern has also been observed in other countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, and Scotland.¹⁴

Indigenous communities

Indigenous communities in countries formed under European colonialism, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, experience a particularly high burden of harm from tobacco use.¹⁵ Retail strategies targeting these communities contribute to higher tobacco use in among these communities.

In the U.S. tobacco companies use “price reductions, coupons and giveaways, casino and bingo promotions,” to target Native American smokers on or near Tribal lands, which can be exempt from state and federal tobacco control laws.¹⁶¹⁷

• For more information see Industry Pricing Strategies

The industry also markets newer nicotine and tobacco products at indigenous communities, for example in New Zealand Philip Morris International (PMI) was found to be targeting Māori people with discounted prices for its IQOS Heated Tobacco Product.¹⁸

According to a leaked PMI corporate affairs document, the industry is interested in building relationships with “allies that cannot be ignored” to help promote industry products.¹⁹ Indigenous public health experts have suggested that “Indigenous peoples could offer the useful political ‘ally’ for the tobacco industry that is hard to ignore.”¹⁹

Targeting based on gender

In the retail environment there is a long history of cigarette branding targeted at women in high-income countries, with the development of brands like Vogues, Slims and Eve, designed to appeal to female smokers. Menthol cigarettes have also been targeted at women.²⁰

In more recent decades these retail strategies have been employed more widely in low and middle-income counties (LMIC’s),²¹ with cigarette packaging designed to resemble cosmetic packaging and to fit in to purses, decorated in pink and other colours traditionally associated with femininity.²²

For a detailed explanation of the ways in which tobacco companies profit by marketing towards women and girls see Targeting Women and Girls

Men are also targeted with specific retail strategies, particularly in countries with significantly higher male smoking rates than female.²³

This strategy tends to take the form of gendered branding, similar to the type targeting women. Since the 1960s, images of traditional, rugged masculinity, such as the Marlboro man, have been used to appeal to men, contributing to the idea that the act of smoking is a masculine pursuit and encouraging men to smoke.²⁴ The same “macho” marketing approach is also taken with newer products such as e-cigarettes.²⁵

Targeting LGBTQ+ people

People who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual or queer (LGBTQ+) are also affected by specific tobacco industry retail strategies, and smoking rates among LGBTQ+ people are higher than among the general population.²⁶ Again, most of the research in this area has been conducted in the US. One study found that “tobacco retailers concentrate disproportionately in neighborhoods […] with a greater concentration of same-sex couples.”¹⁰

In California LGBTQ+ people were disproportionately affected by tobacco product price discounts, an effect that was heightened if those individuals were also members of “other vulnerable groups, including young people and communities of color.”²⁷

There is a longer history of tobacco advertising targeting LGBTQ+ people, though this has generally taken place outside the retail environment. For example, in the U.S. in the 1990s Philip Morris targeting adverts for its revitalised Benson and Hedges cigarette brand at gay male consumers via “gay media and sponsored gay community events.”²⁸ Leaked industry documents also show that between 1995 and 1997 R. J. Reynolds in the U. S. employed a marketing strategy named disturbingly named “Project SCUM”²⁹ which advertised in areas commonly visited by gay men and homeless people using targeted ads that “played on language important to this community, including taglines mentioning ‘pride’ or ‘the right to choose.’”.³⁰

Tobacco Tactics Resources

• Advertising Strategy
• Tobacco Industry Targeting Young People
• Be Marlboro: Targeting the World’s Biggest Brand at Youth
• Racism and the Tobacco Industry
• Targeting Women and Girls
• Flavoured and Menthol Tobacco
• Flavoured and Menthol Tobacco in the US
• Shaping Retail: The Tobacco Industry’s Playbook
• Shaping Retail: The Role of Incentives
• Shaping Retail: Undermining National Regulations