Noy Thrupkaew
While
the Marlboro Man surveys the great Eastern frontier from posters, walls, and
cigarette stands all over Vietnam, young “Marlboro cowgirls” offer free
cigarettes to pedestrians and beckon young people into company-sponsored events
such as “Hollywood Nite.”
In
Japan, ad copy for Virginia Slims cigarettes‹the most popular women’s brand
in the world‹reads, “I’m going the right way‹keeping the rule of the
society, but at the same time I am honest with my own feeling. So I don’t care
if I behave against the so-called `rules’ as long as I really want to.” In
the background, a slim woman with indeterminate facial features‹the glamorous,
possibly Asian, possibly Caucasian kind of face that dominates the media in many
Asian countries‹embraces a fair-haired man. The tag line for this campaign?
“Be You.”
Meanwhile,
in the United States, Philip Morris donates money to domestic violence shelters
in communities of color; and sponsors minority women’s groups such as the
Mexican American National Women’s Association. And in their most recent move
to target U.S. women of color, Philip Morris launched a $40 million
“multicultural” ad campaign for their Virginia Slims cigarettes in December
1999 that featured Asian, African, Latina, and white models under the slogan,
“Find Your Voice.”
What’s
behind these campaigns? According to tobacco-control activists, recent slow
profits and damaging lawsuits against big tobacco in the United States have
resulted in an onslaught of marketing dollars directed at these two untapped
markets: women overseas, particularly women living in developing nations and
minority women in the United States.
U.S.-based
transnational tobacco corporations such as Philip Morris, which owns both
Marlboro and Virginia Slims, suffered several highly publicized setbacks within
the past two years, including the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). The
settlement banned outdoor advertising and the use of cartoons in advertising
cigarettes, and prohibits the targeting of youth‹a major tobacco market‹in
promotions, advertising, or marketing. As a result, the overseas market has
become even more appealing to the tobacco industry. “As the United States has
been clamping down on [the tobacco industry], the money they put abroad has been
increasing exponentially,” said Joon-Ho Yu, program coordinator for the
California-based Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF), one
of four groups in the California Joint Ethnic Tobacco Education Networks.
U.S.
tobacco companies have seen huge results from their overseas campaigns, which
more than compensate for slower profit increases in the United States. In
contrast to declining smoking rates in industrialized countries, smoking in
developing nations has skyrocketed in the past twenty years. Philip Morris, the
world’s largest cigarette company, raked in huge profits from its
international marketing‹overseas profits soared 256 percent in the last ten
years, while profits in the United States increased only 16 percent.
Alarmed
by statistics on rising rates of smoking in developing nations, public health
officials and tobacco activists in 1996 began to formulate an international
treaty on tobacco control that would set legally binding global standards on
tobacco-control issues, including advertising, taxation, and education and
prevention. Since that time, the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework
Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) has gained momentum‹if ratified by all
191 member nations, the convention could put a serious dent in transnational
tobacco’s grip on markets overseas. As for tobacco’s strategies in this
country, the “Find Your Voice” campaign is just the latest sign that in the
United States, the “next great frontier” for the tobacco industry is women
of color, according to Alvina Bey Bennett, the chair of Virginia’s National
Coalition FOR Women AGAINST Tobacco.
According
to Gregory Connolly, director of the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program,
“Since the Master Settlement Agreement, there has been a very sharp increase
of cigarette advertising directed toward ethnic females. There’s been a change
and shift in the types of models in the ads‹Virginia Slims went from using
whites to a `rainbow’ strategy [in the “Find Your Voice” ads] as a way to
pay the bill.”
In
the United States, work on the development of “Find Your Voice”
counter-campaigns has galvanized women’s tobacco-control groups. The National
Coalition FOR Women AGAINST Tobacco launched their “Loud and Clear” campaign
in response to the “Find Your Voice” ads, creating educational counter-ads
and action kits for women’s and girls’ organizations across the country. The
Women’s Tobacco Control Coalition awarded over $40,000 in grants to Los
Angeles community organizations to curb smoking among young women and girls of
color.
For
many U.S. tobacco-control activists, the increased domestic marketing directed
at minority women is inextricably linked to the targeting of women overseas.
According to Bennett, “Everybody wants to mimic American life, it’s a good
life. If inequalities dominate your day-to-day life, escaping with a cigarette
is very appealing. The same applies to minority women. Despite the wonderful
standard of living in this country, there are pockets of poverty and lower
levels of education, and ethnic groups are prey to the selling of the myth of
freedom and glamour and wealth through cigarettes.” In addition, armed with
the knowledge that “when [U.S. anti-tobacco activists] make a dent here,
[tobacco responds by] becoming rampant globally,” according to Yu, women
tobacco activists in the United States are focusing their energies on both
domestic and international campaigns. “After all,” said Bonnie Kantor, the
network manager of the U.S.-based International Network of Women Against
Tobacco, “if [the tobacco industry] can’t do it here, we have to make sure
they can’t do it over there.”
Tobacco
Empire Expands
The
tobacco industry has already gained a strong foothold in the male market. The
majority of men in China, the United States, Japan, Russia, and Indonesia – the
top five cigarette markets worldwide in 1996 – called themselves smokers.
Women
in these countries, however, have a much lower level of smoking. In Vietnam, the
country with the highest smoking prevalence in the world, 74 percent of men
smoke, compared to a mere 4 percent of Vietnamese women. These low numbers among
women, according to tobacco-control activists, could mean big dollars to
U.S.-based transnational corporations. Patti Lynn, the associate campaign
director of the corporate accountability organization INFACT noted, “In
developing countries, the women have often traditionally not smoked and
represent an incredibly lucrative expansion market for U.S.-based transnational
corporations.”
As
a result, “transnational tobacco companies have shifted their focus to
developing nations with aggressive marketing campaigns targeting women and
girls,” according to a WHO report. The development of “women’s brands”
featuring “light” or “slim” cigarettes, the barrage of goods such as
hats, lighters, skirts, and purses covered with tobacco logos, the sponsorship
of disco dances and beauty pageants, and the use of women as “cigarette
girls” to give away free samples are some of the tactics used by tobacco
companies to entice women to smoke.
Much
of the attention is focused on Asia, with its enormous potential markets of
China and Southeast Asia and just-developing free-market systems, where the
enforcement of trade regulations is not always consistent. This laxity produces
what Soon-Young Yoon, New York liaison between WHO and the Campaign for
Tobacco-Free Kids, called a marketing “free for all” that results in rising
rates of smoking. WHO predicted that sales in Asia would increase by 35 percent
by 2000, and tobacco companies are spending advertising dollars to ensure that
Asian women will be part of the next wave of smokers.
Many
of the print ads for tobacco in Asia feature Western women who espouse ideals of
empowerment, individuality, and rebellion.
Japan’s
largest advertising agency, Dentsu, asserts that white models lend a “sense of
foreignness to Japanese products, serving as symbols of prestige, quality, and
modernity…. In the globalized context of consumer culture, a Western woman and
her choice of cigarettes project a powerful symbol,” according to a WHO report
entitled “The Culture of the Body.”
In
response to international marketing strategies, feminist activists working on
the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control have pushed for bans on advertising
and the printing of tobacco logos on high-products, in addition to urging the
tobacco-control movement to become more inclusive of women. Soon-Young Yoon
explained, “We are not just victims of advertising, but need to be seen as
leaders in the tobacco control movement.”
Women
of Color in the United States: Tools and Targets of Global Tobacco? That idea
rings true to tobacco activists in the United States who are working to empower
women in their own communities, especially as U.S. tobacco activists have
started to recognize the repercussions of gains made in the United States on the
developing world. “Tobacco control is like a water balloon,” said Kantor,
“you push it down here and it bulges out there.”
Recognition
of this permeability between communities in the United States and those abroad
has shed new light on the importance of minority women to the tobacco industry,
according to some tobacco activists. “The women in other countries tend to
look up to American women as being more successful and leading more exciting
lives. And anyone who can fly back to their homeland, or their parents’
homeland‹such a person would be looked up to,” explained John Banzhaf of
ASH. “In a sense, that woman who returns becomes a walking advertisement, a
billboard for not just smoking but for a specific product.”
Recognizing
the transnational nature of growing segments of the U.S. population,
tobacco-control activists became alarmed when the Virginia Slims “Find Your
Voice” ads first appeared in a September 1999 Advertising Age article on the
new campaign. The ads, which have several different permutations, often feature
women in traditional clothing, and have copy in languages such as Swahili and
Spanish. Officially released in November 1999, the ads appeared in magazines
such as Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal, People, Essence, Vibe, Black Elegance,
and Latina.
The
ads “signaled to me that the industry was going to use a more far-reaching
approach in their recruitment of women here and abroad,” said National
Coalition FOR Women AGAINST Tobacco Chair Bennett. Filled with exotic images of
“foreign-ness” – different languages, kente cloth, an African woman in a
headwrap, an Asian woman with heavy face paint and silk robes, and stereotypical
messages (for the Asian woman, “In silence I see, with wisdom I speak”) –
the ads present the flip side of most of the advertising in Asia, which peddles
an equally exotic Westernization. With the “Find Your Voice” ads, Virginia
Slims manages to sell a message of seeming tolerance (for international women of
color in stereotypical roles) to a white audience, and acceptance for the ethnic
heritage of minority women (as long as they adopt the Western method of
“finding their voice” by lighting up).
And
the “Find Your Voice” ads can exert a powerful pull, according to Bennett.
“They are telling women 1you can become acculturated, but can maintain that
part of your heritage. And it’s working. It’s not okay for Asian American
women to smoke, but in this ad, they’re telling you that you can retain
`traditional’ elements of your heritage even though you smoke. For African
American women who are searching for that identity and link with their heritage,
the message `No single institution owns the copyright to beauty’ next to a
beautiful African woman – that’s powerful.” The same could be said about
women abroad, who are continually bombarded with images of “Western”
lifestyles, attitudes, and bodies that are too often contrasted against and
privileged above their own. So for U.S. women of color and women abroad,
what’s the way to solve any tension between an ethnic heritage and
“Americanization,” between being a non-Western woman and desiring goods and
attitudes the tobacco industry has forcibly equated with Westernization? Just
smoke a cigarette.