Documents from the nation's major tobacco companies show cigarette-makers targeted Hispanic and Asian immigrants over a 30-year period to seduce them into smoking, researchers report today.
In the 1970s, when smoking began to decline among middle- and upper-class whites, immigrants were viewed as a new market, according to a report in the
American Journal of Public Health. The study reveals the marketing strategies and consumer profiles the companies developed to ensure that cigarette sales would climb.
Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, an assistant professor of public health at Harvard and lead author of the research, said immigrants were targeted to promote assimilation into U.S. culture. "To some extent, part of the story was the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel," she said.
Acevedo-Garcia said the study found evidence tobacco companies tried to appeal to Mexican migrants and Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants with seductive ads suggesting American cigarettes were associated with higher status.
Those efforts put more emphasis on social status than similar ones aimed at blacks and working-class whites, Acevedo-Garcia said. In Vietnam, for instance, an Asian brand dubbed "555" was already associated with elevated social class.
Mindful of that, American companies designed ad campaigns to portray U.S. brands providing social elevation. Ads aimed at blacks and whites focused instead on being hip and cool. Acevedo-Garcia and colleagues recommended public health advocates launch counter-marketing strategies to undo years of industry persuasion.
"These strategies were very well thought out, and they were unprecedented because they targeted people in this country and in their native countries," Acevedo-Garcia said.
Documents showed that the companies advertised in China, Vietnam and throughout Latin America as a way to introduce people to American cigarette brands - a strategy Acevedo-Garcia described as an effort to capture markets even before people decided to immigrate to the United States.
Researchers combed thousands of pages released under the Master Tobacco Settlement Agreement, signed in 1998 by major cigarette makers, after 46 states sued over smoking-related health problems. Marketing strategies were spelled out in memos, letters, studies and marketing surveys from American Tobacco, Brown and Williamson, Lorillard, Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.
