In Marketing Strategy, Tobacco Company Behind Eraserheads Concert Targets Teens

Twenty-seven years ago, Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro, the world’s most popular cigarette brand, outlined in an internal research its marketing strategy.

“It is important to know as much as possible about teenage smoking patterns and attitudes,” the company said in a special report dated March 31, 1981, and titled “Young Smokers: Prevalence, Trends, Implications, and Related Demographic Trends.” (It is quoted here and elsewhere on the Internet.)

“Today’s teenager,” the report continued, “is tomorrow’s potential regular customer, and the overwhelming majority of smokers first begin to smoke while in their teens.” It added that “it is during the teenage years that the initial brand choice is made.”

The quote, which I first read on Ipat Luna’s Multiply site, is evidently the strategy that is the bedrock of Philip Morris’s marketing campaign. This was the case nearly three decades ago and this is proving to be even truer these days. As governments around the world continue with their campaign to combat smoking, tobacco companies are left with little choice to hawk their products, and are thus training their sights on teenagers. If a teen gets hooked on tobacco — and most smokers, as the company itself acknowledged, started smoking in their teens — the company is assured of a regular customer. A not too shabby idea, that.

Philip Morris’s sponsorship of the Eraserheads reunion concert fits perfectly into this strategy. They have tapped a band that is extremely popular among teenagers and young adults — the market that Philip Morris has been salivating over for decades now.

This is another reason why the Department of Health must go to the courts and stop Philip Morris from sponsoring the concert. The stakes are simply too high.

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Contrary to the idea being propagated in online forums, anti-tobacco advocates are not trying to “suppress” the Eraserheads concert. They have stated rather clearly that they have no objection to the concert idea — just to the fact that Philip Morris is behind it and is circumventing the law to market its product.

The anti-tobacco advocates, who yesterday held a press conference asking the Eraserheads to reconsider, are being ridiculed in these online forums and are being depicted as a bunch of asses. One member even went to the extent of saying that these advocates are idiots and are pandering to the crowd at the expense of the eheads — and then he asked the members of the forum what they thought of the effort to “suppress” the Eraserheads concert. Talk about pandering.

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It strikes me as infantile, this tendency by many Eraserheads fans to ridicule those who are opposed to Philip Morris’s involvement in the Aug. 30, but are largely silent about the fact that a tobacco company that sells a deadly and toxic product is behind it. Indeed, they’re even thanking Philip Morris for trying to pull this off.

I thought this issue is clear enough: the anti-tobacco advocates are not the bad guys here. Philip Morris, by violating the law and by using its money to exploit the popularity of the Eraserheads to market a deadly product, is the bad guy. Philip Morris should be the one crucified, not the anti-tobacco people. (Carlos H. Conde/pinoypress.net)