Marlboro Man - Origins

Origins

Philip Morris & Co. (now Altria) had originally introduced the Marlboro brand as a woman's cigarette in 1924. Starting in the early 1950s, the cigarette industry began to focus on promoting filtered cigarettes, as a response to the emerging scientific data about harmful effects of smoking. Marlboro, as well as other brands, started to be sold with filters. However, filtered cigarettes, Marlboro in particular, were considered to be women’s cigarettes. Advertising executive Leo Burnett was looking for a new image with which to reinvent Philip Morris's Marlboro brand to appeal to a mass market. To this end, beginning October 23rd, 1964 on the back cover of Time Magazine, the first of a series of advertisements illustrated by Bruce Bomberger appeared. These advertisements focused entirely on spotlighting rugged and masculine cowboy persona. With the rugged and masculine tone in mind, that first advertisement was Marlboro Man's now famous rope. In the months ahead, that was followed by his boot, then his hat, and then his saddle. The final advertisement of the series ran in Life Magazine on July 22nd 1966. That ad introduced his horse. It also, for the first time, put together all the persona pieces that had been previously introducd, thus revealing a new reinvented Marlboro Man for the Marlboro Country advertising campaign. This was the rugged cowboy Leo Burnett anticipated would open the door to the male dominated mass market. In the aftermath of that advertisement, the real cowboys and actors, who subsequently played Marlboro Man, adopted this illustrated persona. It took only a few years for the results to register. By 1972 the new Marlboro Man would have had so much market appeal, that Marlboro Cigarettes was catapulted to the top of the tobacco industry.

Using another approach to exapand the Marlboro Man market base, Philip Morris felt that the prime market was “post adolescent kids who were just beginning to smoke as a way of declaring their independence from their parents.” Most filtered cigarette advertising sought to make claims about the technology behind the filter. Through the use of complex terminology and scientific claims regarding the filter, the cigarette industry wanted to ease fears about the harmful effects of cigarette smoking through risk reduction. However, Leo Burnett decided to address the growing fears through an entirely different matter; creating ads completely void of health concerns or health claims of the filtered cigarette. Burnett felt that making claims about the effectiveness of filters furthered concerns of the long term effects of smoking. Thus, refusing to respond to health claims matched the emergent, masculine image of the New Marlboro. Burnett's inspiration for the exceedingly masculine "Marlboro Man" icon came in 1949 from an issue of LIFE magazine, where the photograph (shot by Leonard McCombe) and story of Texas cowboy Clarence Hailey Long caught his attention. The new Marlboro also included images of other masculine occupations such as sea captains, athletes, and gunsmiths. However over time, the focus became on the cowboy as the image of the Marlboro Man.