In December 2012, Australia became the first country in the world to introduce legislation mandating plain packaging for tobacco products. Plain packaging legislation prohibits the use of logos, colours, brand images or promotional information on the packaging of tobacco products. However, brand and product names are allowed in a prescribed, standardised colour and style, in addition to pictorial health warnings. Our contention is that the Government of India (GOI) must seriously consider introducing this legislation to stem the preventable deaths of more than 1.2 million Indians annually due to tobacco use. Tobacco’s active ingredient is nicotine, an addictive substance. But contributing to the persistence of the addiction is the status associated with the attractiveness of the package in which the substance itself is marketed and sold. The manner in which tobacco packaging serves the purpose of sustaining this addiction in its current users and converting new ones to it is well researched and has been perfected by the tobacco industry.
Tobacco packaging has served India’s tobacco companies in multiple ways. This goes well beyond assisting in product differentiation and is commonly termed “selling from the shelf”. It includes, but is not limited to brand identification, brand navigation and finally, brand selection. The pack is an important component of an overarching strategy to not only create a brand but also a future cohort of addicts. One may even argue that as part of the branding exercise, packaging assists in developing brand loyalty. Packaging is used to promote the product by using the same strategies employed by other consumer goods firms: specifically, packaging innovation, design and value packaging.
Importance of Packaging
Packaging is a key marketing tool for tobacco companies and offers a wider reach than advertising. It creates a tangible, explicit link between the company and the consumer. India’s largest cigarette company, ITC, has invested and deployed market research companies and advertising firms to develop new designs and colour schemes for its new and enduring cigarette brands. Market research firms have found that the colour of the pack is an important attribute of the overall brand identity.
The tobacco industry is well aware of the psychographic appeal of the interplay of colour and design. Tobacco industry documents reveal substantial investments in packaging design research from as early as the 1950s. A range of market research methods have been deployed including the use of focus groups with youth and market surveys in colleges and office areas. ITC commissioned a series of studies for the launch and the re-engineering of its brands. Some of these include Project Ingot (for the re-launch of Benson and Hedges cigarettes in 1998)1 and Project Little Buddha (for the global launch of State Express 555).2 In May and June 1988, ITC’s main rival, Godfrey Phillips India (GPI) conducted focus-group discussions to understand the role of its brands, their packaging and image and how these could be improved.3
Budget allocations to read the minds of potential and existing smokers have never posed a monetary constraint for the cigarette industry. In 1991-92, ITC spent $700,000 annually on market research alone. In 1983, Vazir Sultan Tobacco Company spent $3,000,000 on the market research and launch of its new brand Charms. The advertising firm which was given the mandate put most of its efforts into product packaging with a breakthrough of the new denim look, which signified a low price but fashionable cigarettes.4, 5
In May 1993, ITC conducted an ambitious market study called Project Barracuda to launch global brands in India with both international and locally-relevant packaging.6 Taking advantage of access to these materials reveals much about the role of packaging as a subset of the marketing strategies of key Indian companies. For example, surveys done by ITC and GPI conclude that urban consumers (and increasingly tier-2 cities and rural pockets) have become so accustomed to this use of colour and design that their responses to these cues are automatic. Elements of the packaging bouquet have been used by cigarette companies to strengthen brand image and bring in gender acceptability (in the case of Wills by ITC and Charms by GPI) and colour is one variable of this targeted approach. But there is more – cigarettes have even been positioned in terms of a product with an exclusive “male” positioning, conveying a sense of strength and dominance (for example, India Kings). Market studies have also found that changing the packaging for cigarette packs can alter taste perceptions. Thus, even traditional cigarette brands need to reinvent themselves with new fonts, pack designs and colour schemes.
The depth and range of research that tobacco companies have engaged in with respect to fine-tuning the design element on the package serves one fundamental purpose: to initiate and retain users. Analyses of the target market converge on the fact that most smokers begin smoking when they are young. Further, a large majority of these young adults who smoke are also brand conscious. In fact, teenage smokers smoke the most heavily-advertised brands.7
In 2003, India instituted the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act (COTPA). This effectively eliminated public advertising and event sponsorships as a key avenue of marketing and brand building. However, attractive cigarette packaging continues to remain a vital tool in retaining users despite the many useful provisions of COTPA.
Effectiveness of Plain Packaging
This raises the obvious question: what if cigarette packaging were made unattractive, through a mix of unattractive or non-existent brand imagery, unattractive colours and enhanced pictorial warnings? Would cigarette use decline? Various studies from the mid-1990s have explored these causal factors and the main finding is that unattractive cigarette packages are in fact associated with reduced initiation of smoking, greater cessation-seeking behaviour amongst smokers, better quit rates and also strengthening recall of health and pictorial warnings.8 A brief survey of a few key findings will suffice.
When New Zealand introduced textual health warnings on cigarette packages in 1990, a group of young people (the average age was 13) was surveyed in an examination of branding and plain packaging. The key finding was that if brand imagery was reduced, there was higher recall of health warnings. In December 2011, the British Heart Foundation commissioned a study and found that 80% young Scots thought that selling cigarettes in plain packages without colourful branding or logos and with larger health warnings would make it easier for people to smoke less or to quit.9 India-specific data from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) assessing the effects of cigarette package health warnings on interest in quitting smoking documented the following. Of the Indian smokers who observed the package warning, over 50% thought about quitting. In 2008, an experimental study examined the hypothesis that smokers would “rate an original branded pack more positively than their plain pack counterparts, and that plain packs with progressively fewer brand-associated elements [would] be rated more negatively”.10 This study found that of the various kinds of plain packages that cigarettes were presented in, those “packs with increasingly fewer brand design elements [were] perceived increasingly unfavourably in terms of the smokers’ appraisals of the packs, the smokers who might smoke such packs, and the inferred experience of smoking a cigarette from these packs”.11 Not surprisingly, the policy conclusion from this experiment was simple: the removal of as many brand design elements from the cigarette package as possible would be favourable for tobacco control efforts. Many more such studies can be cited. As Wakefield suggests, and this is consistent with market research applicable to other products, tobacco package branding and labelling does modify the subjective experience of products when they are consumed.12
Further studies in India conducted in 2012 also suggest that regardless of socio-economic status, individuals perceive the “badge value” of attractively packaged tobacco products as a way to flaunt one’s wealth and, conversely, the fact that if the packaging of tobacco products were mandatorily made far less attractive, consumers would shift to more attractively packaged products. Further, in terms of the ranking of the elements on the package that were noticed first, over 50% of the respondents noticed the brand name, the colour and the package design and only after that, did they notice the pictorial health warnings.13
Plain packaging is likely to meet active resistance from the tobacco industry. It will affect the use of trademarks and other intellectual property. The tobacco industry is likely to oppose plain packaging on grounds of trademark and property rights violations. Provisions under bilateral investment treaties and international investment agreements also are likely to be presented as being hostile to plain packaging provisions. However, a closer legal analysis and reading of legal texts will demonstrate that sovereign states are well within their rights to introduce plain packaging legislation. Plain packaging legislation as a public health measure is compatible with the overriding public health interests that it seeks to enshrine.
Conclusions
A cigarette package is not a neutral physical space – it is used by tobacco companies to express cognitive cues to retain existing users and even attract new users. As a tobacco company executive put it:
If you smoke, a cigarette pack is one of the few things you use regularly that makes a statement about you. A cigarette pack is the only thing you take out of your pocket 20 times a day and lay out for everyone to see. That’s a lot different than buying your soap powder in generic packaging.14
Plain packaging is effective. Recent evidence before the introduction of the legislation and evidence after the introduction of the legislation from Australia supports this fact. In fact, a recent study on the impact of plain packaging in Australia demonstrates that smokers who used plain packaged cigarettes were 66% more likely to view their cigarettes as being of a poorer quality than one year ago and 81% of these were more likely to have thought about quitting at least once a day during the previous week, and many were more likely to view and give quitting smoking a higher priority in their lives.15 To paraphrase the words of Victor Hugo, plain packaging legislation in India may well be an idea whose time has now come.
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