To sell its products and renew its consumer base, the tobacco industry – like many other sectors – makes active use of the social networks which are so immensely popular among young people. Unlike traditional media, these more recent communications platforms benefit from a reluctance among the authorities to impose usage restrictions. As a result, the tobacco industry can utilise marketing strategies here which are extremely effective, such as those which harness the power of the renowned ‘influencer’ community. We spoke to Professor Julien Intartaglia1, Dean of the Institute of Communication and Experiential Marketing (ICME) at HEG Arc Neuchâtel and a specialist in consumer behaviour, who helps us decode the strategies behind this new advertising genre.
Professor Intartaglia, what do we mean by ‘subliminal marketing’?
Julien Intartaglia: To answer this question we need to understand how consumers become consumers. We all have two ways of learning things in the brain. The first is what we call explicit learning. This is something we engage in from infancy, ever since our parents start to teach us values, ideas and beliefs by communicating and explaining them to us. This is conscious information, and it’s imparted over time. This is also how we learn what we’re not allowed or supposed to do – like warnings on the dangers of tobacco.
Most of what we learn, though, comes into our unconscious mind through non-verbal communication. Work that’s been conducted at Harvard has shown that over 95 per cent of what we acquire in our brain is acquired unconsciously. If, for instance, we see our parents or their friends smoking, we get an unconscious initiation into the social dimensions of the act of tobacco consumption.
From a neurological standpoint, we can see this in terms of a much-cited model. ‘System 1’ thinking, or fast thinking, is a thought that evolves very quickly, almost reflexively, and needs very little effort. Taking elements that are very easy to draw on – stereotypes, received ideas and so on – our brain makes constant use of this System 1 thinking to take our decisions.
The rapid growth and the phenomenal success of today’s social networks can be partially explained by the fact that they are very well aligned to this reflex thinking response: the simpler the stimulus, the happier our mind will be to assimilate and process it. Input like this enables us to take decisions in milliseconds, via an unconscious automatic process. Marketing draws on this reality. Which naturally raises certain ethical questions.
How does the tobacco industry make use of these strategies?
The tobacco industry is very smart: it learned some time ago that it has to take different tacks in order to sell its product. And it’s in the light of this awareness that it’s accelerated the bringing to market of ‘new’ tobacco formats – e-cigarettes, puff bars and so on – that are intended to counterbalance all the data evidence of the last few decades on the dangers of tobacco consumption. These new products are cast in a reassuring light and promoted on social networks to young users, who are the prime target audience. So what we end up getting here is an implicit learning process – repeated exposition to stimuli that are linked to the consumption of tobacco and nicotine products.
To this is then added social influence marketing, which is highly developed on social networks. Social influence marketing is based on the phenomenon of social comparison, which has been well documented in the psychology field since the 1950s2. In brief: we behave first and foremost as social beings, as imitators. We seem to possess some kind of ‘mirror’ neurones, which both enable us to decode someone’s utterance or action and simultaneously want to reproduce it ourselves. If, for instance, you’re in a meeting and everyone else has a bottle of water in front of them, all it takes is for one attendee to take a drink for everyone else to get the urge to do the same. Unconscious influence is what we’re dealing with here.
Social networks play massively on this social comparison phenomenon: we look at others and we strive to imitate them. It all happens as if there was some predisposition in our behaviour that blocks out any awareness that our behaviour is being driven by our repeated exposition to what we see on the social networks. But where it all gets pernicious is when we’re dealing with tobacco products. Because unlike other products we may be unconsciously drawn to consume, tobacco products are by their nature addictive.
So shouldn’t we just ban such advertising online?
Banning the advertising of tobacco products in the media – social network included – would be a first step. But we also need to address two other socialising agents that are at work here: parents and peers. To do this, I would be in favour of making sure that, from a very young age, children are better guided in their use of social networks and better enlightened on how they work. Prevention that’s ongoing, playful and immersive is just as essential, I feel. This will enable is to cultivate the free will and the critical mind among young people who, at some point in the future, will have to get to grips with the reality of social networks. But as we can’t just ban every way in which these products may be seen, we have to seek to understand how the brain works, how it processes the input it receives and how it makes its decisions.
Why are young people especially targeted by these campaigns?
Three to five hours a day on social networks for Gen Z3, 39 minutes a day of exposure to online videos (YouTube in particular) for two-to-four-year-olds.4 These numbers tell by themselves just how huge the phenomenon is. Add to this the fact that advertising on social networks is virtually free of any minimum-age restrictions, and also of any requirement to provide any warning messages or even to clearly identify a product as a tobacco product. So the tobacco industry can freely promote its products to possible new consumers, to renew its customer base.
And it does so: with arguments extolling the pleasures, the fun and the de-stressing, and with well-worked marketing stimuli: simple, colourful, fruit-flavoured, but all presented as safe and all within the leisure and lifestyle domain, with no mention of these products’ dangerous side. The brands have really reinvented the whole consumption of tobacco, by casting traditional cigarettes as old-fashioned and presenting their new replacement products as “better for your health”. And it’s working. The heated tobacco products market was worth USD 7.3 billion in 2019. But the sector is expected to grow by 32.8 per cent between 2020 and 2027. So it’s easy to understand why young people are such an attractive target group.
How much are the brands currently putting into their social marketing activities?
Of the CHF 6.9 billion that was spent on advertising in Switzerland in 2022, 41 per cent went into the internet.5 Back in 2000, that figure was no more than two or three per cent. It’s a simple fact that, increasingly each year, the brands are turning their back on the traditional media. In the internet and especially in social networks, they see possibilities opening up to them to make full and fruitful use of the influencer marketing approach. In a way, online influencers are the billboards of today. But they’re far more effective. Influencer marketing is traceable and measurable, because we can track its engagement rates: hits, likes, comments and more. And unlike traditional advertising, which is clearly identifiable as such, advertising via an influencer is far less identifiable as an advertising approach.
Subjected to their content over and over again, the follower gradually enters into an affective relationship with the influencer they are following. And the influencer’s behaviour, be it good or bad, will create its own ‘initiation’ – a powerful implicit predisposition in the follower to emulate it. According to a study6 conducted in 2020, 55 global influencers were working with more than 600 e-cigarette brands. Given that some influencers are known to have several million followers, this provides the tobacco manufacturers with a captive target audience that is more important than most TV channels.
The social networks offer the brands a further ace, too: they activate the brain’s reward system and the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter of pleasure. They prompt an anticipation of pleasure, through the user’s consumption of their content and the feedback – the likes, the views and the interactions – they receive. The more the user shows, the more they want to show more. Social networks are an addictive support that enables products to be sold by presenting them in a positive light – even if the product concerned is provenly harmful to health.
