Cigarette Advertising And American Culture

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Advertising is the primary use of marketing by companies to promote their products. It is used to lure the public, or certain group of people towards the company or the company’s product, and make the consumer want to purchase, and keep purchasing. This was the case with cigarette companies in Canada and the United States until strict regulations started coming into effect, such as cigarettes being banned from advertising on television and radio in the U.S. in 1971 (Qi 215) and Canada’s “Tobacco Products Control Act” of 1988, which “provided the authority to ban all tobacco advertising; to impose restrictions on and gradually phase out promotional activities and sponsorship of events or persons by tobacco manufactures; and to require more explicit health warnings on tobacco product packages” …show more content…

The extent at which cigarettes were consumed in the twentieth century in the United States grew so much to the point that “between 1990 and 1965, per capita consumption rose from 49 to 4918” (Brandt 157). There are many factors that lead to this major consumption of cigarettes, but one that greatly aided in this was mass marketing and advertising. Allan Brandt states in his article, The Cigarette Risk and American Culture , “advertising promised consumers well-being and power” (Brandt 157). Advertising misleads people from the negative and unknown effects of cigarettes, to a blind world in which cigarettes gave people a sense of well-being and power. It created “demand for relatively undifferentiated, nonessential items” which “was the core of the new consumer culture” and the cigarette epitomizes this (Brandt 157). Tobacco companies people feel as though the world of smoking cigarettes would be promising, one in which made the individual as manly as “The Marlboro Man” of Marlboro Cigarettes or as cool as “Joe Camel” of Camel

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