[Intl-tobacco] The New Face of Tobacco: Women

[Robert Weissman]

The New Face of Tobacco
by Noy Thrupkaew
Source: ZNet (Z Magazine), Wednesday, 2/14/01

While the Marlboro Man surveys the great Eastern frontier from posters,
walls, and cigarette stands all over Vietnam, young “Marlboro cowgirls”
offer free cigarettes to pedestrians and beckon young people into
company-sponsored events such as “Hollywood Nite.”

In Japan, ad copy for Virginia Slims cigarettes--the most popular women’s
brand in the world--reads, “I’m going the right way--keeping the rule of
the society, but at the same time I am honest with my own feeling. So I
don’t care if I behave against the so-called `rules’ as long as I really
want to.” In the background, a slim woman with indeterminate facial
features--the glamorous, possibly Asian, possibly Caucasian kind of face
that dominates the media in many Asian countries--embraces a fair-haired
man. The tag line for this campaign? “Be You.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, Philip Morris donates money to domestic
violence shelters in communities of color; and sponsors minority women’s
groups such as the Mexican American National Women’s Association. And in
their most recent move to target U.S. women of color, Philip Morris
launched a $40 million “multicultural” ad campaign for their Virginia
Slims cigarettes in December 1999 that featured Asian, African, Latina,
and white models under the slogan, “Find Your Voice.”

What’s behind these campaigns? According to tobacco-control activists,
recent slow profits and damaging lawsuits against big tobacco in the
United States have resulted in an onslaught of marketing dollars directed
at these two untapped markets: women overseas, particularly women living
in developing nations and minority women in the United States.

U.S.-based transnational tobacco corporations such as Philip Morris, which
owns both Marlboro and Virginia Slims, suffered several highly publicized
setbacks within the past two years, including the 1998 Master Settlement
Agreement (MSA). The settlement banned outdoor advertising and the use of
cartoons in advertising cigarettes, and prohibits the targeting of
youth--a major tobacco market--in promotions, advertising, or marketing.
As a result, the overseas market has become even more appealing to the
tobacco industry. “As the United States has been clamping down on [the
tobacco industry], the money they put abroad has been increasing
exponentially,” said Joon-Ho Yu, program coordinator for the
California-based Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum
(APIAHF), one of four groups in the California Joint Ethnic Tobacco
Education Networks.

U.S. tobacco companies have seen huge results from their overseas
campaigns, which more than compensate for slower profit increases in the
United States. In contrast to declining smoking rates in industrialized
countries, smoking in developing nations has skyrocketed in the past
twenty years. Philip Morris, the world’s largest cigarette company, raked
in huge profits from its international marketing--overseas profits soared
256 percent in the last ten years, while profits in the United States
increased only 16 percent.

Alarmed by statistics on rising rates of smoking in developing nations,
public health officials and tobacco activists in 1996 began to formulate
an international treaty on tobacco control that would set legally binding
global standards on tobacco-control issues, including advertising,
taxation, and education and prevention. Since that time, the World Health
Organization (WHO)  Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) has
gained momentum--if ratified by all 191 member nations, the convention
could put a serious dent in transnational tobacco’s grip on markets
overseas. As for tobacco’s strategies in this country, the “Find Your
Voice” campaign is just the latest sign that in the United States, the
“next great frontier” for the tobacco industry is women of color,
according to Alvina Bey Bennett, the chair of Virginia’s National
Coalition FOR Women AGAINST Tobacco.

According to Gregory Connolly, director of the Massachusetts Tobacco
Control Program, “Since the Master Settlement Agreement, there has been a
very sharp increase of cigarette advertising directed toward ethnic
females. There’s been a change and shift in the types of models in the
ads--Virginia Slims went from using whites to a `rainbow’ strategy [in the
“Find Your Voice” ads] as a way to pay the bill.”

In the United States, work on the development of “Find Your Voice”
counter-campaigns has galvanized women’s tobacco-control groups. The
National Coalition FOR Women AGAINST Tobacco launched their “Loud and
Clear” campaign in response to the “Find Your Voice” ads, creating
educational counter-ads and action kits for women’s and girls’
organizations across the country. The Women’s Tobacco Control Coalition
awarded over $40,000 in grants to Los Angeles community organizations to
curb smoking among young women and girls of color.

For many U.S. tobacco-control activists, the increased domestic marketing
directed at minority women is inextricably linked to the targeting of
women overseas. According to Bennett, “Everybody wants to mimic American
life, it’s a good life. If inequalities dominate your day-to-day life,
escaping with a cigarette is very appealing. The same applies to minority
women. Despite the wonderful standard of living in this country, there are
pockets of poverty and lower levels of education, and ethnic groups are
prey to the selling of the myth of freedom and glamour and wealth through
cigarettes.” In addition, armed with the knowledge that “when [U.S.
anti-tobacco activists] make a dent here, [tobacco responds by] becoming
rampant globally,” according to Yu, women tobacco activists in the United
States are focusing their energies on both domestic and international
campaigns. “After all,” said Bonnie Kantor, the network manager of the
U.S.-based International Network of Women Against Tobacco, “if [the
tobacco industry] can’t do it here, we have to make sure they can’t do it
over there.”

Tobacco Empire Expands

The tobacco industry has already gained a strong foothold in the male
market.  The majority of men in China, the United States, Japan, Russia,
and Indonesia - the top five cigarette markets worldwide in 1996 - called
themselves smokers.

Women in these countries, however, have a much lower level of smoking. In
Vietnam, the country with the highest smoking prevalence in the world, 74
percent of men smoke, compared to a mere 4 percent of Vietnamese women.
These low numbers among women, according to tobacco-control activists,
could mean big dollars to U.S.-based transnational corporations. Patti
Lynn, the associate campaign director of the corporate accountability
organization INFACT noted, “In developing countries, the women have often
traditionally not smoked and represent an incredibly lucrative expansion
market for U.S.-based transnational corporations.”

As a result, “transnational tobacco companies have shifted their focus to
developing nations with aggressive marketing campaigns targeting women and
girls,” according to a WHO report. The development of “women’s brands”
featuring “light” or “slim” cigarettes, the barrage of goods such as hats,
lighters, skirts, and purses covered with tobacco logos, the sponsorship
of disco dances and beauty pageants, and the use of women as “cigarette
girls” to give away free samples are some of the tactics used by tobacco
companies to entice women to smoke.

Much of the attention is focused on Asia, with its enormous potential
markets of China and Southeast Asia and just-developing free-market
systems, where the enforcement of trade regulations is not always
consistent. This laxity produces what Soon-Young Yoon, New York liaison
between WHO and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, called a marketing
“free for all” that results in rising rates of smoking. WHO predicted that
sales in Asia would increase by 35 percent by 2000, and tobacco companies
are spending advertising dollars to ensure that Asian women will be part
of the next wave of smokers.

Many of the print ads for tobacco in Asia feature Western women who
espouse ideals of empowerment, individuality, and rebellion.

Japan’s largest advertising agency, Dentsu, asserts that white models lend
a “sense of foreignness to Japanese products, serving as symbols of
prestige, quality, and modernity.... In the globalized context of consumer
culture, a Western woman and her choice of cigarettes project a powerful
symbol,” according to a WHO report entitled “The Culture of the Body.”

In response to international marketing strategies, feminist activists
working on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control have pushed for
bans on advertising and the printing of tobacco logos on high-products, in
addition to urging the tobacco-control movement to become more inclusive
of women.  Soon-Young Yoon explained, “We are not just victims of
advertising, but need to be seen as leaders in the tobacco control
movement.”

Women of Color in the United States: Tools and Targets of Global Tobacco?

That idea rings true to tobacco activists in the United States who are
working to empower women in their own communities, especially as U.S.
tobacco activists have started to recognize the repercussions of gains
made in the United States on the developing world. “Tobacco control is
like a water balloon,” said Kantor, “you push it down here and it bulges
out there.”

Recognition of this permeability between communities in the United States
and those abroad has shed new light on the importance of minority women to
the tobacco industry, according to some tobacco activists. “The women in
other countries tend to look up to American women as being more successful
and leading more exciting lives. And anyone who can fly back to their
homeland, or their parents’ homeland--such a person would be looked up
to,” explained John Banzhaf of ASH. “In a sense, that woman who returns
becomes a walking advertisement, a billboard for not just smoking but for
a specific product.”

Recognizing the transnational nature of growing segments of the U.S.
population, tobacco-control activists became alarmed when the Virginia
Slims “Find Your Voice” ads first appeared in a September 1999 Advertising
Age article on the new campaign. The ads, which have several different
permutations, often feature women in traditional clothing, and have copy
in languages such as Swahili and Spanish. Officially released in November
1999, the ads appeared in magazines such as Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal,
People, Essence, Vibe, Black Elegance, and Latina.

The ads “signaled to me that the industry was going to use a more
far-reaching approach in their recruitment of women here and abroad,” said
National Coalition FOR Women AGAINST Tobacco Chair Bennett. Filled with
exotic images of “foreign-ness” - different languages, kente cloth, an
African woman in a headwrap, an Asian woman with heavy face paint and silk
robes, and stereotypical messages (for the Asian woman, “In silence I see,
with wisdom I speak”) - the ads present the flip side of most of the
advertising in Asia, which peddles an equally exotic Westernization. With
the “Find Your Voice” ads, Virginia Slims manages to sell a message of
seeming tolerance (for international women of color in stereotypical
roles) to a white audience, and acceptance for the ethnic heritage of
minority women (as long as they adopt the Western method of “finding their
voice” by lighting up).

And the “Find Your Voice” ads can exert a powerful pull, according to
Bennett.  “They are telling women 1you can become acculturated, but can
maintain that part of your heritage. And it’s working. It’s not okay for
Asian American women to smoke, but in this ad, they’re telling you that
you can retain `traditional’ elements of your heritage even though you
smoke. For African American women who are searching for that identity and
link with their heritage, the message `No single institution owns the
copyright to beauty’ next to a beautiful African woman - that’s powerful.”
The same could be said about women abroad, who are continually bombarded
with images of “Western” lifestyles, attitudes, and bodies that are too
often contrasted against and privileged above their own. So for U.S. women
of color and women abroad, what’s the way to solve any tension between an
ethnic heritage and “Americanization,” between being a non-Western woman
and desiring goods and attitudes the tobacco industry has forcibly equated
with Westernization? Just smoke a cigarette.