Propaganda of Big Tobacco Companies - Case Study Example

Studies are utilized by advertising agencies to identify potential buying demographics. This information is then used to target specific markets and to learn about public attitudes, why they buy specific products and what sort of promotions would most appeal to their desires to purchase. To some companies, marketing is about generating sales, period. Their efforts to ‘reach the consumer’ have elevated well beyond simple marketing and have reached the level of propaganda in their attempts to retain and increase their market share.

The tobacco industry has used such studies to target the young and uninformed. They have used deceptive advertising as a result of these findings in the form of marketing ‘low-tar’ cigarettes. They have also used cartoon-like characters to appeal to the youth consumer. To their delight, this strategy indeed generated sales as planned without an ethical thought as to the propagandist approach they were adopting in their manipulation of society. The marketing of filtered and low-tar cigarettes was planned to comfort smokers worried about the health risks associated with the smoking habit and to impart this new product as an alternative to not smoking.

The degree and extent of big tobacco’s use of propaganda is the focus of this study.The purpose of the present study is to discover how and where big tobacco companies have used propaganda in their regular activities to shape public opinion and gain new customers. Although people in the Western modernized world seem to be letting go of the smoking habit as it becomes more widely acknowledged that smoking carries with it significant health risks, tobacco company practices in developing worlds and in the past in the modern countries can be seen to use plenty of persuasion techniques to encourage individuals to smoke.