RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 ‘No-Barriers’ tobacco product? Selling smokeless tobacco to women, people of colour and the LGBTQ+ community in the USA
JF Tobacco Control
JO Tob Control
FD BMJ Publishing Group Ltd
SP 330
OP 337
DO 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2020-056178
VO 32
IS 3
A1 Hendlin, Yogi Hale
A1 Small, Sarah
A1 Ling, Pamela M
YR 2023
UL http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/32/3/330.abstract
AB Background In both Sweden and the USA, smokeless tobacco (ST) is legal and used predominantly by men. Starting in the 1970s, US tobacco companies attempted to expand the ST market to women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other sexual orientation (LGBTQ+) people.Design We analysed industry documents from the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library triangulating findings with recent ST advertising and publicly available literature.Findings We found tobacco companies used design innovations such as pouched moist snuff, snus and dissolvable products to expand the market. In addition, diverse advertising campaigns targeted women, people of colour (Hispanic, African American) and LGBTQ+ communities with identity-targeted messages emphasising novelty, convenience, cleanliness and use in smoke-free environments. However, stereotypes of ST users as rural white males endured, perpetuated by continued marketing aimed at this customer base, which created cognitive dissonance and stymied marketer’s hopes that pouch products would ‘democratize’ ST.Conclusion These failed campaigns suggest novel products such as nicotine pouch products may provide a ‘clean slate’ to similarly target women and other low-ST-using groups. Based on this history, the risk of new tobacco and nicotine products to increase health disparities should be closely monitored.Data are available in a public, open access repository. All data for this study are openly and publicly available tobacco industry documents freely and immediately available at the Truth Tobacco Documents Library (https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco).Images in Figures are openly and publicly available from the Trinkets and Trash archive (https://www.trinketsandtrash.org/) or the Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising archive (https://tobacco.stanford.edu/).