You've Come A Long Way Baby -- Cigarettes, Feminism, and Targeting Women in Advertising and Branding History

Welcome to brand strategy and advertising. I'm Bob Bacheler. This episode takes us into some of the most calculated, sophisticated, and frankly troubling territory in American advertising history. The tobacco industry's century long campaign to make cigarettes not just acceptable for women, but aspirational, glamorous, feminist. That last word is the one that should stop you. Because at the heart of this story is one of advertising's most audacious maneuvers. The systematic hijacking of a genuine social movement to sell a product that, by the industry's own internal documents, they knew was deadly. This isn't a story about advertising at its creative best. It's a story about advertising at its most cynical. And understanding how it worked, how it kept working across decades and waves of feminism, is essential to understanding how persuasion operates at the highest and most dangerous level. Part one, the torch of freedom. The story begins before most people think it does, not with Virginia Slims in 1968, but in 1929. With a public relations stunt engineered by Edward Bernays. Bernays, who is sometimes called the father of modern public relations, was hired by the American tobacco company to expand the female market for cigarettes. The challenge was social. In 1929, respectable women simply did not smoke in public. It wasn't done. The taboo was powerful enough to constitute a genuine market barrier. Bernays didn't try to change the rule directly. Instead, he reframed the cigarette entirely. Working with a psychoanalyst to identify the symbolic meaning of smoking for women, he concluded that cigarettes were symbols of male power. His solution was theatrical and calculated. He arranged for a group of debutsants to march in New York City's Easter Sunday parade, smoking openly, and he tipped off photographers in advance. Then he made sure the story was framed as women lighting torches of freedom, claiming their independence, defying patriarchal restrictions, asserting equality. The press ran it. The image landed. And Bernays had accomplished something that decades of straightforward advertising couldn't. He had made female smoking a symbol of liberation rather than transgression. This is the template. And the tobacco industry would return to it in more and more sophisticated forms for the next 70 years. Every time the culture shifted, every time women's definitions of independence, glamour, or identity changed, the tobacco industry was there to attach its product to the new version. That's the playbook. Keep it in mind as we move through the decades. Part two, glamour and the War Years World War II opened a second front in this campaign. With millions of men overseas, women entered the American workforce in numbers that had never been seen before. Steel mills, shipyards, munitions factories. Rosie the Riveter became the icon of this transformation. Women were doing the work. They were earning wages. They were in ways that hadn't been possible before, economically autonomous. The tobacco industry understood this immediately. SIGARET advertising of the 1940s positioned smoking not just as glamorous, but as congruent with a new kind of woman, capable, modern, self-determining. The Hollywood connection was central. Rita Hayworth smoked Chester Fields. Marlena Dietrich smoked lucky strikes. These were not incidental associations. They were the result of deliberate celebrity placement strategies, designed to make every woman who bought a pack feel that she was buying a piece of the world those women inhabited. And it worked in the numbers. Positioning lucky strikes as a weight control aid reached for a lucky instead of a suite, produced a greater than 300% increase in sales for the brand in a single year. This wasn't accidental. The industry had identified what women feared weight gain, the loss of the slender figure that culture equated with desirability and offered a deadly product as the solution. There is something almost breathtaking about the efficiency of this. Identify an anxiety. Position the product as the answer. Attach it to aspirational figures. Repeat. When the men came home after the war and women were largely pushed back into domestic roles, the tobacco industry adapted again. The 1950s ads show mothers in advertisements, babies in arms, cigarettes in hand. One Philip Morris campaign featured copy that essentially had a baby asking its mother to smoke. Before you scold me, Mom, maybe you'd better light up a moral burrow. The post-war housewife was now the target, not because she was glamorous, but because she was anxious. She was tired. She deserved a moment of pleasure. And there was a cigarette waiting to provide it. Part three. You've come a long way, baby 1968. The second wave of feminism is in full force. Protests, consciousness raising groups, the national organization for women, Betty Friedan's, feminine mystique still reverberating from five years earlier, the culture is moving, fast, and women are at the center of it. Philip Morris watches all of this and sees a market opportunity. Virginia Slims launches that year. The first cigarette designed explicitly and entirely for women. Slender, long, colorful packaging. And a tagline that is never quite left American cultural memory. You've come a long way, baby. Read those words carefully. They acknowledge progress. Real, hard-won, feminist progress. They locate women in a narrative of liberation. And then they sell a cigarette on the back of that narrative. The ads paired the slogan with images of women from the suffragette era. Restricted, corseted, dependent, contrasted with the modern woman, free and smoking. The message was explicit. This cigarette is your torch of freedom. A direct callback to Bernays, 40 years later. The campaign was wildly successful. It was also by any honest accounting. A predatory act dressed as a celebration. Here's the data that makes the predation undeniable. In the six years following the introduction of Virginia Slims and other gender-specific cigarettes. The smoking initiation rate among 12-year-old girls increased by 110%. That number deserves a moment. Not adult women, 12-year-old girls. The industry had so thoroughly embedded cigarette smoking into the visual and emotional vocabulary of female liberation. That it was reaching children who hadn't yet developed the critical apparatus to interrogate what they were being sold. Philip Morris knew exactly what they were doing. A 1976 internal document noted with chilling clinical detachment that women were naturally more involved with low-tar cigarettes because of their nurturing role in society. They were the document explained. Guilt ridden with concerns for their families if smoking might damage their health. The low-tar cigarette was not developed to be safer. It was developed to keep women who might otherwise quit smoking. The healthier option was a retention strategy. This is advertising operating as manipulation at the highest level. The product was killing people. The industry knew it. And they spent millions of dollars making sure women didn't stop buying it. Part four, the silk cut problem. By the 1980s, the stakes had become impossible to ignore. The 1980 Surgeon General's report announced what should have been obvious. Women were dying from smoking-related diseases in numbers that reflected how long they'd been smoking heavily. Lung cancer surpassed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death in women by 1987. The industry had manufactured an epidemic, and yet the advertising continued, and in some ways grew more sophisticated. Consider the silk cut campaign created by Sachi and Sachi beginning in 1982. Widely considered one of the most artistically ambitious cigarette campaigns ever produced. The ads never showed the product. They never mentioned smoking. Each ad simply showed deep, purple silk being cut. Sometimes cleverly. sometimes beautifully, sometimes with a dark wit. The brand name appeared, the only copy was a tar warning and a brief health notice. From a purely craft standpoint, this is remarkable advertising. It proved that an audience could be primed to think of a product without a single explicit selling message. It treated viewers as sophisticated participants in a kind of ongoing aesthetic puzzle, but look at who it was targeting. Deep purple, fashion imagery, sleek minimalism. The ads ran heavily in publications aimed at women. The campaign moved the product positioning entirely off the health risk terrain, which was, by this point, undeniable, and onto a register of pure aesthetic identity. You're not buying cigarettes. You're affiliating yourself with a certain kind of visual intelligence, a certain kind of style. That's the move. When the product can no longer be defended on any rational ground, you stop defending it on rational grounds. You sell identity instead. Meanwhile, in 1980, Philip Morris paid $42,000 to have Marlboro logos placed more than 20 times in Superman 2. Lois Lane, a role model for girls across the country, chained smoked Marlboro lights throughout the film, which spent the next decade in television rotation. Product placement in a film for all ages film, starring a feminist icon. The industry left no channel untouched. Part 5. The Third Wave in the Limits of Cynicism. The 1990s brought what many scholars describe as "Third Wave Feminism." Broughter, more intersectional, attentive to race, class, sexuality, and the diverse forms women's lives actually took. And once again, the tobacco industry showed up. Documents in hand, ready to adapt. Virginia Slims launched Find Your Voice, a campaign encouraging women to speak up, to assert themselves, to claim their own stories. RJ Reynolds introduced Dakota cigarettes, targeted specifically at working class women in the service industry, explicitly described in internal documents as "viral females," who would respond to imagery of leather jackets and rebellion. By 1993, Philip Morris was the second largest advertiser in the United States, behind only proctor in gamble. Marborough was valued by financial world as the world's most valuable brand at $39.5 billion. The industry had survived decades of health warnings, congressional hearings, and mounting litigation. Seven tobacco executives testified to Congress in 1994 that they did not believe nicotine was addictive. The industry had become so practiced at defending the indefensible that its representatives could say things like that. In public, under oath. In 2007, Camel introduced number 9s, packaging designed to evoke Chanel No 9 perfume, available in Vogue and Glamour, offered with promotional gifts of pink lip gloss and cell phone charms. In 2008, Philip Morris announced purse packs for Virginia Slims, smaller packages shaped to look like cosmetic cases. A hundred years after Bernays lit the first torch of freedom, the industry was still added. Still finding new ways to attach the product to female identity, female aspiration, and female style. Here's what's worth considering. This is not a story about a handful of bad actors making cynical decisions. This is a story about an industry deploying the full apparatus of modern advertising. Research Psychology Cultural Analysis Celebrity placement Product design Media strategy With extraordinary competence, in service of a product it knew was killing its customers. Every tool we study in this course, positioning, targeting, emotional appeals, aspirational branding, lifestyle marketing, was used here. That doesn't indict the tools. But it does demand that we understand them clearly, without sentimentality, and with a clear eye toward whose interests they serve. There's a line from the conclusion of one of our source chapters that deserves to be read slowly. What started out as a torch of freedom became an addiction that more than 140,000 liberated American women die from each year. That sentence sums up the problem. It names the appropriation, torch of freedom, and it names the cost. And it forces a question that is relevant to every course we take. Every campaign we analyze. Every strategy we develop. Liberation for whom? On whose terms? At what price? The tobacco industry's campaign targeting women is one of the most thoroughly documented case studies in the history of advertising. We have the internal memos. We have the market research. We have the decade by decade record of a strategy that never stopped adapting. Never stopped finding new cultural handholds. Never stopped exploiting real women's real aspirations to sell a product that shortened their lives. As brand strategists. Which is what this course is training you to be. You need to know this story. Not because the tactics are off limits. The tactics work. They work extraordinarily well. You need to know this story because the power of those tactics carries a proportional responsibility for how you deploy them. The question isn't whether you can attach your brand to a cultural movement. The question is whether you should and what the full accounting of that decision looks like. History has a way of writing that accounting whether we want it to or not. I'm Bob Bacheler. Thanks for listening to brand strategy and advertising.