Generic cigarettes: coming to a smoker near you

by Jeffery Racheff

Lungs aside, smokers tend to be a resilient bunch. You can take away their advertising, raise sales taxes 400% and ban cigarettes from being within three miles of the nearest doorway, but if a die-hard smoker wants a drag, there is little outside of Armageddon that will keep him from getting one. Smokers also tend to be fiercely loyal to their respective brands. Once they’ve incorporated the Kools image into their own, there’s little chance of separating the two.

But what if the entire brand itself was white-washed? What if the only thing smokers had to distinguish between cigarettes was the name alone? That’s the next step for anti-smoking lobbyists in the U.K. — demote Marlboro of its red stripe, remove the bulls-eye from Lucky Strikes and de-feather American Spirits. They want plain packaging, with the cigarette name in simple type next to a prominent health warning. The idea is to discourage brand attachment among older smokers, and to keep new smokers from developing a connection.

Since the 1950s, when the Federal Trade Commission sought to stop tobacco companies from portraying cigarettes as healthful,  cigarette brands have suffered a slow and steady decline in advertising. In 1971 all radio and television ads were banned, and in 1996 the FDA began to set aggressive regulations that aimed to reduce the availability of tobacco products (in many states now, smoking is banned from most public places, including restaurants and bars). But the U.K. has some of the toughest (grossest) regulations, with manufacturers recently required by law to include a graphic picture of yellow, rotten teeth or diseased lungs on every box. Brand removal would then be the next step in an effort to effectively cripple the tobacco industry.

So would a camel-less Camel still bring in lovers of the brand? Maybe, maybe not. Many of the smokers I know tend to take an approach similar to gun advocates and the second amendment — “I’ll give you my cigarette when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!” So taking all the life and color out of the boxes probably won’t have much of an effect on existing smokers. When you still want to smoke after grabbing a cigarette from a box that says “Smoking will kill you,” you’re probably pretty set in your ways. What changing the imagery probably will do is create a much bigger demand for after-market cigarette cases.

Of course, this may even backfire and benefit the tobacco industry. The idea of putting a skull-and-crossbones and a jawless cancer victim on a box of smokes may sound off-putting to anyone else, but it could end up looking pretty bad-ass to smokers. Anti-image (or non-image)  fits the modern smoker to a T — the hipster who consumes low-end brands solely for the irony, the young smoker discovering the joys of participating in something vaguely illicit and off mainstream. The act of smoking is already heavily frowned upon, so plain packaging and a conspicuous message that says “This Is Dangerous!” may only make it that much more attractive.

But even if the legislation passes, and smoking suddenly becomes cool again because of generic packs, the effect will be nothing more than a short-lived blip on the profits of tobacco companies. All of this new legislation is aimed at stopping smokers before they start. How are you going to get a new smoker to pay more money for a ‘higher quality’ cigarette when it looks exactly the same as the cheapest box on the shelf? How long can you really market a product if it has no image, no context, no color and looks exactly the same as everything else, with a little morbidity thrown in for extra measure?

So if all of this goes through, smokers may have to deal with losing the luster of their favorite brands. And whether it’s from cancer or just a loss of identity, cigarette-smokers appear be a dying breed.