Features
Blowing Away the Smoke
Marketing prof studies branding strategies of tobacco companies
BY REBECCA KENDALL
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| Smoking rates are falling, but it still causes 45,000 premature deaths in Canada each year, says Prof. Tim Dewhirst. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
It's a product that millions of Canadians use regularly. It drives a multi-billion-dollar industry, is heavily regulated by government and is lighting up the research of Prof. Tim Dewhirst, Marketing and Consumer Studies.
“Tobacco is an unusual product category,” says Dewhirst, who blended his interests in media, marketing and advertising, policy analysis, sociology, cultural studies and public health to launch his career as a researcher. “There aren't many products where more than half of your consumers regret that they're consuming.”
A specialist in tobacco marketing, he says research on this topic is important because smoking is a major public health issue.
“Despite the fact that smoking rates continue to decline in Canada — which is encouraging news — we still have an estimated 45,000 premature deaths each year that are attributed to smoking. There are tremendous social costs.”
Dewhirst, who joined U of G in July, has never grappled with tobacco addiction personally, but his grandfather did and died of lung cancer.
“I wouldn't say his death motivated my decision to do this work, but I'm sure it was a factor to some degree.”
Over the past few years, he's been reviewing internal corporate documents produced by the tobacco industry to learn about the strategies used to persuade people to buy tobacco products. He's also looking at how cigarettes have historically been branded.
Integral to this topic is how the industry has used sponsorship of events ranging from concerts to car races to spread its message, says Dewhirst, who has served as a consultant for California's attorney general, Health Canada, Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada and the World Health Organization.
“Sponsorship advertising became more lifestyle- or image-driven,” he says. “A key thing tobacco companies did was to use images that closely matched the event. If the brand promoted individualism, they'd sponsor individual sports. If the brand was about adventure, then extreme sports or auto racing was a good fit for that. If the brand was about prestige and exclusivity, they'd sponsor tennis, golf or classical music.”
One goal of this advertising was to normalize smoking and make people think it's a common practice, he says.
“Sponsoring an event allowed the brand to be connected to it and, when applicable, to the athlete or celebrity at the centre of it. There's an image transfer that goes on.”
Dewhirst, who started his university career as a physical education student at the University of Toronto, went through an image transfer of sorts himself during his third year when he enrolled in a sociology and media course.
For that course, he wrote a paper about the controversy surrounding female reporters gaining access to the men's locker room after a sporting event to interview the athletes. This contentious issue sparked his interest in media studies and legal matters, and he began to consider his options for graduate work at Queen's University, which led him to the regulation of tobacco advertising.
“By the time I was completing my master's thesis, it was becoming front-page news,” says Dewhirst, who later completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia.
In addition to his research on cigarette marketing and sponsorship, he was a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar and has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to study how brands are gendered in terms of marketing. His primary focus is Virginia Slims, an American cigarette brand that is targeted to women in most countries, yet is geared to men in the Korean market.
In the 1980s, the United States placed considerable pressure on several Asian countries to open their markets to American products, including cigarettes, he says. In these markets, an estimated two-thirds of men smoked, but far fewer women did.
“In Korea, for example, about four per cent of women smoked. Japan was higher with about 15 per cent.”
Dewhirst was curious about how Virginia Slims would be marketed, if at all, considering that its target market in the United States was women.
“In many Asian countries, the company stayed consistent with the brand and marketed to women, but in Korea, the ads showed Korean men smoking Virginia Slims with the tagline: ‘For the Successful Man.'”
Although he acknowledges that most people realize smoking is bad for their health, his biggest concern lies with children who pick up the habit.
“The most common age people start smoking in Canada is 13 or 14. Market research indicates that this age group understands smoking is bad for them, but they really underestimate the power of the addiction. If you ask 13- and 14-year-olds who smoke the occasional cigarette if they think they'll be smoking in 20 years, they'll most often say ‘no.' That's the unfortunate thing. When people are making the initial decision to smoke, they're more vulnerable and don't fully comprehend what they're getting into.”
Although new to the U of G campus, Dewhirst is no stranger to Guelph. In fact, he grew up in the Royal City and attended Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute.
“It's great to be able to return to my hometown,” says Dewhirst, who last taught at the University of Saskatchewan. “When the opportunity to teach here came up, I thought it would be good given the University's mandate to change lives and improve life and its commitment to social responsibility. It was also a great opportunity to be closer to family and friends.”