Cigarette Makers’ Colorful Answer to FDA Packaging Regs
This past June, the U.S. Senate empowered the FDA to oversee the marketing and packaging of tobacco products. Among the FDA’s first targets: controversial descriptors like “light,” “mild,” and “low tar,” terms that regulators claim improperly imply healthful qualities (and are already banned in dozens of countries around the world). While tobacco companies have until June 22, 2010, to drop the language from their marketing, some brands are already evolving the language and colors on their packaging. Manufacturers claim they are simply communicating relevant brand attributes to consumers, but health advocacy groups argue the changes are intended to circumvent the new laws. The FDA has stated that the changes are under review.
Fast Company tapped two tobacco control experts: David Hammond, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, and Maansi Bansal-Travers, a research scientist with the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. They provided their take on the industry’s reaction to the new regulations. Is it appropriate advertising or marketing malfeasance? Take a look for yourself at the slides that follow and let us know what you think.
“As marketing restrictions become stronger the pack becomes the best marketing tool,” Hammond says. “When the words come off the pack, the industry relies on colors to a greater extent then they used to.”
For example, Pall Mall recently removed descriptors like “full flavor” and “light,” relying entirely on the color of the pack and the names of colors to identify each flavor.
“Of course, brands have always used colors,” Hammond says. “The so called strengths of brands are aligned with the strengths of colors, and many smokers use colors as an indicator of risk. For example, red is perceived to be stronger than blue.”
In other words, as the flavors get “lighter,” so the do the colors. For example, Pall Mall’s Ultra Lights, while a vibrant orange, are still the lightest of the line. (The box was once light blue but was changed to orange in 2007 to avoid confusion with the blue Lights box.) The lighter the color, the healthier it appears to many smokers. In one of Hammond’s recent studies, 80% of those questioned (smokers and non-smokers) believed that cigarettes packaged in a light-blue box would taste better, would contain less tar, and would be safer than cigarettes packaged in a dark-blue box.
“Orange is a very interesting choice,” Bansal-Travers says. “No other brand I can think of uses orange as a cigarette pack color, but orange is certainly the lightest that PM uses, creating a spectrum of color and trying to equate that with the spectrum of risk.”
Primary design changes: Flavor descriptors, such as “Filter” and “Light,” have been dropped, replaced with the names of colors.
Secondary design changes: The phrase “Famous American Cigarettes” has been moved to the bottom. While the logo and Latin phrases “Per aspera ad astra” (“Through hardships to the stars”) and “In hoc signo vinces” (“By this sign you shall conquer”) remain, the phrases “KING SIZE BOX” and “Wherever particular people congregate” have been removed from the front of the boxes.
BY Lucas Conley, Oct 22, 2009
