Cigarette Influencer Marketing

A story about how cigarette companies used influencer marketing and rebellion messaging to get women to start smoking in an era when it was taboo.

"Cigarette sales were flat because they were only smoked by men - it was already super saturated. They realized the only way to grow sales was by getting the other 50% of the population to start smoking. At the time, smoking was seen as not cool for women, it was seen as a dirty masculine thing to do.

The marketing guy behind the campaign used influencers - he got all the Kardashians of their time together. There was a cultural issue around women's rights at the time. He got all these influential women to go to this big parade in New York, had them stand on a float, and gave them all cigarettes. He told them 'When you turn this corner, you're going to light that cigarette right when all the journalists are there with their cameras, and you're going to defiantly smoke in front of them.'

He planted somebody in the crowd near the journalists who called them 'torches of freedom.' The journalists then wrote that phrase in their stories - 'they lit up these torches of freedom.'

The same marketer did another campaign when their cigarette brand color was green, which wasn't fashionable at the time. Instead of rebranding, he got those same influential women to go to a major fashion event all wearing that exact shade of green. After that, green became trendy for women, and sales of that brand went up because he made the color cool."