The secrets of the tobacco companies

What does marketing 101 have to do with smoking?

The marketing guru, Jay Abrahams, offers three basic steps toward growing a successful business:

• Step 1: Increase the number of clients
• Step 2: Increase the average transaction
• Step 3: Increase the frequency that the client buys from you

If you think about this model, cigarettes are the perfect product! Unlike a razor or a toaster, cigarettes are so addictive that people have no choice but to keep paying for them, no matter how much you raise the price.

This is one reason the tobacco industry is home to some of the richest companies in the world. On top of that, they have spent decades making their products even more addictive!

Tobacco companies have dumped huge sums of money into developing a highly effective Nicotine Delivery System (NDS). Smart, manipulative chemicals go into cigarettes that cause nicotine to dissolve into the body faster, getting people hooked from the very first cigarette they smoke. Studies show that 20-25% of smokers get addicted from their first cigarette.

With the addiction taken care of, the other challenge for tobacco companies is getting people to smoke that first cigarette. This is where the media comes in! By targeting highly effective advertising campaigns at impressionable audiences, such as teenagers and young adults, tobacco companies portray smoking as sexy, cool, and rebellious. Not only are younger people more susceptible to manipulation from this type of marketing, but they are the most valuable customers. If a certain company gets a teenager to smoke their brand, he/she is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars as a lifetime customer!

Smokers are not to blame for their addictions. They have been manipulated by a multi-billion dollar industry into using one of the most addictive substances on earth!

Why do some people have the urge to smoke and others don’t?

Despite what you might think, the urge to smoke has nothing to do with personality, age, what you do for a living, or what kind of person you are. All smokers began as non-smokers, and all smokers can go back to being non-smokers! Everybody is born with the same basic needs: Air, Water, Food, and Sleep. These are fundamental to human survival. Without them, you will die. (Notice that cigarettes are not on that list!)

Smokers feel the “need” to smoke in order to relax, enjoy life, and cope with stress. But, smokers were not always smokers. There was a time in every smoker’s life where he or she existed and managed to do all of those things without the need or desire to smoke.

The only difference between smokers and non-smokers is that smokers are chemically dependent on a product that they have been manipulated into thinking they need to survive. The tobacco industry manipulates people into seeing smoking as reflecting a certain lifestyle: cool, young, and sexy. We can all think of examples from blockbuster films where the hero marks a victory by lighting a cigarette.

These images plant the seeds of desire before the smoker even takes their first puff, and pushes them toward that first cigarette. The NDS, engineered to be as addictive as possible, then picks up where the media left off, and pretty soon a non-smoker has turned into a smoker and is convinced they can’t live without cigarettes.