Smokers Report They Are Marketed by Mail

Roughly 39% of all smokers have received a cigarette promotional piece in the mail, according to a new study from Eisner Communications.

This is only one form of the personal targeting conducted by cigarette manufacturers, which spent $8.4 billion on marketing in 1999, according to Eisner.

Another 13% of the respondents have received cigarette giveaways at nightclubs or events, and 12% have been given promotional products. Two percent have been marketed via the Internet.

The cumulative effect of this marketing is that consumers are not sure what they’ve seen. More than half said they have seen a television commercial for cigarettes within the past year, and 30% reported seeing one in the last five years. However, cigarettes haven’t been advertised on television since a Congressional ban took effect in 1970.

“Despite the public media ban, tobacco companies are coming up with new and effective ways to surreptitiously market their products,” said Michael Rowland, senior vice president of Eisner Communications, in a statement. “It is natural for consumers to report they saw television advertising for a product even when there wasn’t any, due to the residual effect of other forms of promotion.”

A fifth of the smokers surveyed said that information in cigarette ads is untruthful. But only 4% said that the ads are informative, and that they influence their brand selection.

Meanwhile, 5% of those surveyed said they would pay up to $15 for a pack of cigarettes if only one store had them in stock. Fourteen percent said they would pay any amount.

Conducted for Eisner by OmniTel/Bruskin Research, the survey is based on a sample of 1,015 adults. There are roughly 51 million smokers in the United States, according to Eisner.