[Intl-tobacco] Canada: TOBACCO SALES TARGET WAS YOUTH - The Globe and Mail (fwd)

[Robert Weissman]

The Globe and Mail=20
Monday, May 29, 2000

TOBACCO SALES TARGET WAS YOUTH

=09Young smokers 'major opportunity group,'=20
=09newly released industry documents say

=09By Mark MacKinnon, Parliamentary Bureau

Ottawa -- Despite repeated denials from the big tobacco companies,
Canadian cigarette manufacturers spent much of the past 25 years trying
to persuade young people to take up smoking, newly released
documents reveal.

The documents, obtained by The Globe and Mail, will be made public
this week by the federal government in a further escalation of its all-out
war on tobacco companies.

Among the thousands of pages is evidence that the industry has been
obsessed since the 1970s with reversing the declining popularity of
smoking as social attitudes changed and government regulations
tightened. Winning over the country's young people became a focus.

"Young smokers represent the major opportunity group for the cigarette
industry, we should therefore determine their attitudes to smoking and
health and how this might change over time," reads a 1971 marketing
plan, marked "confidential," for the Matin=E9e brand.

Another document contains the notes for a speech almost 20 years later
by Purdy Crawford, chairman of Imasco Ltd. British American Tobacco
PLC (BAT) is parent of Imasco, which owns Montreal-based Imperial
Tobacco Ltd.

"Imperial Tobacco Ltd. has always focused its efforts on new smokers,
believing that early impressions tend to stay with them throughout their
lives," he told other BAT executives in 1989. He said his company
"clearly dominates the young adult market today, and stands to prosper
as these smokers age, and as it maintains its highly favourable youthful
preference."

Throughout the documents, children are never mentioned, but terms like
"youths" and "non-adults" are liberally sprinkled. The papers were
uncovered by Health Canada researchers in a huge depository in
Guildford, England, where BAT made eight million pages of memos and
faxes available to the public as part of a lawsuit settlement in the United
States.

The new documents show:

The long-held tobacco industry defence -- that advertising was aimed at
persuading those who already smoked to switch brands, rather than at
getting non-smokers to smoke -- is a smokescreen. The target audience
was given the nickname "switchers."

"When we talk about a switcher . . . this definition includes starters (did
not smoke before) and smokers that had no regular or particular
previous brand," reads one document prepared for Imperial marked
"strictly confidential."

Player's Light, the most popular brand in Canada, was conceived in
1978 as "the brand for modern young smokers," with one of its prime
target markets being "young people starting the smoking habit."

This fact, Imperial president Donald Brown said under oath in a recent
court case, "was not perceived to be a problem." In 1978, Mr. Brown
was Imperial's vice-president of marketing.

One scheme concocted by Imperial was the aptly named Project 16. A
survey of younger smokers was commissioned in the summer of 1977
and the findings delivered to the company's top executives. Learning
more about young smokers, it was written, "has implications for the
future of the industry."

Peer pressure, the study found, persuades many kids to try smoking
between the ages of 11 and 13. They soon got hooked. "However
intriguing smoking was at 11, 12 or 13, by the age of 16 or 17 many
regretted their use of cigarettes for health reasons, and because they feel
unable to stop smoking when they want to," the survey concluded.

The script of a telephone survey conducted in 1992 by another market
research firm on behalf of the industry shows tobacco companies
continued to target young smokers even in recent years.

"May I please speak to the person 15 years of age or older at home at
the moment who smokes tobacco products?" the phone interview script
begins. The survey then asks respondents how often they smoke, which
brands they choose, and what influences their buying decisions. The legal
smoking age that year was 18.

A 1980 Imperial marketing plan lays out a campaign that would include
advertising in media targeting the 12-to-17 age group.

Neil Collishaw, research director with Physicians for a Smoke-Free
Canada, said the new documents are further proof of the lengths tobacco
companies have gone to in trying to court young people.

"What's striking is how much careful planning goes into putting an
emphasis on youth," he said.

The motivation for Imperial, Mr. Collishaw said, was a market share that
fell from 50 per cent in the 1960s to less than 40 per cent in the 1970s,
when the documents suggest the company began targeting young people.
The campaign seemingly paid off, since Imperial now controls about 70
per cent of the Canadian cigarette market.

The release of the documents this week is just the latest stage of Health
Minister Allan Rock's antitobacco campaign. In December, the federal
government launched a $1-billion lawsuit against Toronto-based
RJR-Macdonald Inc., the third-largest cigarette manufacturer in Canada,
alleging it backed massive smuggling across the Canada-U.S. border.

Documents released last year from the same collection showed how
Imperial actively encouraged the smuggling of cigarettes across the
Canada-U.S. border.

The Guildford files, as the eight-million-page collection is known, are
also central to a lawsuit launched by British Columbia against the
tobacco industry that aims to recoup billions of dollars spent on
smoking-related illnesses.

Imperial spokesman Michel Descoteaux said the federal government is
waging a campaign to "demonize" the tobacco industry.=20