The Marlboro Man Misses His Lung
In 1924, tobacco giant Philip Morris introduced Marlboro cigarettes and targeted them to the women’s market. But in the 1950s, it was re-introduced as a filtered cigarette to counter the many new adverse health claims about the harmful effects of smoking. With this introduction, Philip Morris wanted to re-target the brand to men. The problem was that for the previous 25 years, Marlboro was marketed as a woman’s cigarette with the feminine tagline “Mild as May.”
In 1954, to reposition the brand, Philip Morris turned to advertising firm Leo Burnett whose creative team conceived the Marlboro Cowboy for use in a new advertising campaign. It was an immediate hit. In 1955, the year the campaign started, sales rose to $5 billion, a 3,241% increase from the year before. Within two years, sales had rocketed to $20 billion! And by 1972, the various iterations of the masculine, rugged cowboy in the mythical “Marlboro Country” propelled Marlboro cigarettes to become the top-selling brand in the USA. Advertising Age magazine was so impressed that, in 1999, it voted it the number one advertising icon of the century.
As the decades progressed, the enormous adverse health effects of smoking caught up with the tobacco industry, which was forced in 1998 to settle a lawsuit brought against it by the individual states for $246 billion to help compensate them for the deaths and ongoing treatment due to smoking-related diseases.
California used a portion of its money to attack the very symbol of Marlboro’s success. It enlisted advertising agency Asher & Partners to create a campaign using the same rugged iconic imagery of the original Marlboro series but replaced the taglines with such sayings as “I miss my lung, Bob” and “Bob, I’ve got emphysema.” Over the next 20 years, this and other efforts caused per capita cigarette use in California to plunge by over 40%.
Insight and Application
One of the first steps in persuasion is understanding how your opponent has constructed the narrative, which is the basis for their argument. Only by understanding the opposing side’s narrative can you dismantle and systematically replace the elements with your own. In this case, the state of California understood that brands are about meaning. Using iconic imagery, Leo Burnett transformed a mild woman’s cigarette into a rugged masculine product virtually overnight. The cigarette’s meaning was re-imagined and thrust into the number one position.
Asher & Partners realized that they needed to disempower this same iconic imagery and bluntly point out that even rugged cowboys can suffer severe diseases like lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease caused by smoking. As a side note, three of the most famous Marlboro cowboys, Wayne McLaren, David McLean and Dick Hammer, died from smoking-related cancer. McLean’s family went so far as to file a wrongful death lawsuit against Philip Morris, claiming that his cigarette addiction was the cause.
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