Tobacco and Public Health - TCSC Indonesia

JOHN P. PIERCE ET AL. 321
reached independence. The initial goal is to build curiosity to try smoking (equivalent
to susceptibility to smoking).
Once people are susceptible to smoking, converting them to smoking a particular
brand is the goal of ‘reaping’ activities. The first goal of the tobacco industry is to
ensure that cigarettes are fairly easily accessible and at a low cost to the person who is
susceptible to smoking. Pricing, package design, and promotions (such as two-for-one
and free gift with purchase) are activities that can be described as in the ‘reaping’ category.
One of the secret industry documents outlined a ‘reaping’ strategy that had as its
goal getting the young person to smoke 200 cigarettes, claimed as sufficient to achieve
brand loyalty in a new smoker (Young and Rubicam 1990).
The tobacco industry documents outline that they evaluate their advertising campaigns
using the standard ‘hierarchy of effects’ approach. This approach assumes that
the adolescent initially needs to be exposed to the message, with the goal of saturation
exposure. The ‘hierarchy of effects’ model of advertising takes account of the fact that
not everyone who sees an advertising message will be receptive to it. An individual’s
level of receptivity to an advertising campaign can be measured. We classify people
who label an ad as one of their favorites as moderately receptive. Companies that have
been successful in branding their product with an image that resonates with the target
audience frequently use brand-extenders such as tee-shirts or tote bags. The person
who is willing to wear the image of the product on a piece of clothing, for example, is
classified as highly receptive to the marketing campaign.
Using the hierarchy of effects approach to evaluating tobacco advertising, there is
very strong evidence that vast majority of adolescents are not only exposed to cigarette
advertising but are well aware of the images of the advertised cigarette brands. The vast
majority of adolescents understand that cigarette advertising promotes one of the following
benefits of smoking: smoking is enjoyable; it helps people relax; it helps people
feel comfortable in social situations; it helps people stay thin; it helps people with
stress; helps them overcome boredom; and, the ‘in-crowd’ are smokers. Further, the
majority of United States adolescents (even as young as 12–14 years) have a favorite
cigarette advertisement. Around 30 per cent of 15–17-year-old adolescents are willing
to wear a tee-shirt displaying the brand image used to advertise a cigarette. These
results place cigarettes at the top of the products that have good advertising penetration
with adolescents.
There are now four separate longitudinal studies in the United States (Pierce et al.
1998, 2002; Biener and Siegel 2000; Sargent et al. 2000) that have shown that the
more receptive an adolescent is to cigarette advertising and promotions (using the
above hierarchy of effects) the higher the probability that they will experiment
with smoking and become dependent on it. The most recent of these studies indicates
that receptivity to tobacco industry advertising can undermine the effectiveness
of good parenting in protecting adolescents from starting to smoke (Pierce et al.
2002).