Importance of tobacco packaging

Packaging is a central marketing tool for tobacco products and, according to marketing experts and courts, a form of advertising. Tobacco companies regularly monitor and alter packaging to ensure its continuous and increasing appeal to target audiences. Tobacco packaging is highly visible. Cigarette packages are pulled from pockets and handbags and lie in sight many times each day. Tobacco product displays are ubiquitous in stores and kiosks worldwide.

• Packaging is the critical link between the product and all forms of promotion and becomes more important as laws restrict or eliminate other promotional avenues. Packaging displays are a highly prevalent and effective form of promotion. So-called “power walls” – large, attractive displays of tobacco packages behind the checkout at retail outlets – promote tobacco products when the consumer is prepared to buy.
• Packaging conveys product characteristics even when the product does not. Tobacco packaging strongly influences perceptions of the product. Studies have shown that smokers often cannot tell the difference between different brands of cigarettes or other tobacco products.
• Packaging and branding is particularly important to young people, the primary source of new customers for tobacco companies. Tobacco products and particularly cigarettes are “badge” products, with a high degree of social visibility. Users perceive their own personality in the brand image and the brand image reflects back on them.

Importance for public health:

Tobacco packaging is an equally important medium for communication of public health messages. Health warnings on packaging should be seen as a mass media campaign virtually guaranteed to be visible to almost all smokers and many potential smokers.

• A pack-a-day cigarette smoker sees the package – including an effective health warning – at least 7300 times a year.
• Strong, conspicuous warnings could be placed on smoking devices, such as water pipes, which are a prominent feature of social life in many countries.
• Even where sales of single cigarettes or other unpackaged tobacco products are common, health warnings on packages could be required wherever sample packages are displayed.

Using tobacco packages to communicate health information is also an extremely cost-effective public health measure for governments. Tobacco companies bear virtually all the costs, other than those associated with the implementation of any government policy.

Large pictorial warnings reduce package appeal. For example, when cigarette packages with text-only warnings and those with a graphic image combined with text are offered in a simulated auction, smokers offer a lower price for the packages with the warning image.

Perhaps even more telling is the reaction of tobacco companies to pictorial warnings, exemplified by this comment from a tobacco analyst: “Health warning labels matter, not because the content provides new information but because they damage the pack graphics and premium-brand appeal”.