Market Share
By 1997, the advertising of light cigarettes constituted fifty percent of the industry’s advertising spending. Through heavy marketing, the tobacco industry succeeded in misleading its consumer base to believe that light products were safer than regular brands, and thus, that these products were the rational choice for smokers who cared about their health. As a result of these implicit and widespread health claims, the popularity of light and low-tar cigarettes grew considerably. In fact, the market share of light cigarettes grew from a mere 2.0 percent in 1967 to 83.5 percent of the tobacco market in 2005. Due to recent federal regulations requiring that the tobacco industry’s internal documents be made publicly available online, there is no doubt about the industry’s underlying motives behind the development of light products. These documents explicitly state that the industry sought to both maintain and expand its consumer base by manipulating smokers’ health concerns to the industry’s advantage.
Read more about this topic: Lights (cigarette Type)
Famous quotes containing the words market and/or share:
“When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go. You heard of that market crash in ‘29? I predicted that.... I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said; nerves, I said. Then I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?” “Overproduction,” I says. “Collapse.””
—John Michael Hayes (b. 1919)
“Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)