Cigarette Packaging as a Marketing Tool - Essay Example

 Increased restrictions have also made the packaging of cigarettes a means of communication of the brand image and brand quality to the smokers. Reforms in the promotion of tobacco products through packaging are necessary to decrease the high mortality rate because of smoking in Australia.

“Packaging, individual cigarettes or other tobacco products should carry no advertising or promotion, including design features that make products attractive” (Voon, Mitchell, and Liberman, 2012, p. 38). White, Webster, and Wakefield (2008) investigated the impact of introducing the graphic warning labels of health on adolescents and found that established and experimental adolescent smokers were more likely to consider quitting smoking. The researchers also found lower intentions of smoking among students that discussed the new labels of warning with one another. The use of stronger warning labels on the packaging of cigarettes in Australia led to an increase in the population of people that reported that the warning had always caught their attention by 29 per cent (Borland, 1997). 

This is why “[p]ackaging has been used for many years to generate evocative images such as luxury, freedom, glamour, status and masculinity and femininity” (World Heart Federation, n.d., p. 5). Graphic warnings on the packaging of cigarettes in Australia include information on the potential ways of quitting smoking like website addresses and quitline numbers. The use of this strategy has been found to be effective in encouraging smokers to quit smoking (tobaccofreekids.org, n.d., p. 4). This can be estimated from the fact that after the pictorial labels were introduced with the quitline information on the packaging of cigarettes in Australia in the year 2006, a two-fold increase in the rate of callers of quitline was noticed in comparison to the two preceding years (Miller et al., 2009). A substantial increase in the calls to the service of quitline in Australia was noticed which led Miller et al (2009) to the conclusion that the new graphic cigarette packaging containing the quitline number had proven effective.

The display of warning signals and pictures on the packaging of cigarettes serves as a demotivator which might be the reason why it is generally appreciated by the people. Research involving 3000 Victorian adults in the year 2006 led to the conclusion that more than 50 per cent of the non-smokers, former smokers, and current smokers supported plain packaging (Cancer Council NSW, 2011).