Health researchers have revealed this week that tobacco companies specifically designed cigarettes to appeal to women's desires to be thin and healthy in ways that went "far beyond marketing and advertising".
Apparently internal documents released by tobacco companies under a 1998 court settlement show the companies created cigarettes, including "slim" and so-called "light" brands, in part to attract women.
Carrie Murray Carpenter of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study, says the documents reveal that the tobacco industry's targeting of women goes far beyond marketing and advertising, and their study of tobacco company documents show a clear effort to find out what might make women want to smoke. She said at one point the companies considered putting appetite suppressants into cigarettes so they could promote them as weight control products.
Carpenter says it is unfortunate that the industry used these findings to exploit women and not help them. The team said tobacco companies' efforts to attract women included the creation of "slim" cigarettes in the 1970s.
Jack Henningfield of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues comments that the companies manipulated cigarette designs and ingredients in an effort to make cigarettes more palatable to women and to complement advertising allusions of smooth, healthy, weight-controlling, stress-reducing smoke.
The study demonstrates that marketing strategies adopted by the tobacco companies, especially for female brands, have contributed to the association of smoking with appealing attributes including female liberation, glamour, success and thinness.
They also targeted "light" cigarette brands, with their promise of smaller amounts of harmful tar and nicotine, at women torn between the desire to smoke and health worries.