Exploring the e-cigarette e-commerce marketplace: Identifying Internet e-cigarette marketing characteristics and regulatory gaps☆
Introduction
Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) were virtually unknown ten years ago, but are now rapidly growing in popularity in various countries (Ayers et al., 2011). This novel electronic consumer product, first introduced in the United States in 2007, converts concentrated liquid nicotine (e-liquid) into a vapor, which is then inhaled, or “vaped” by the user through different delivery systems (e.g., look-alikes, pen-style, “Mods”, and disposables; Farsalinos and Polosa, 2014, Huang et al., 2014b, Yamin, 2010). The growing popularity of e-cigarettes can be measured by their burgeoning sales in countries such as the U.S., a primary market for e-cigarettes. In 2007, U.S. sales brought in a modest $5 million per annum with sales now estimated at some $2.2 billion as of May 2014 accompanied by rapid increases in promotional expenditures (Herzog et al., 2014a, Kornfield et al., 2015). The product landscape is wide and varied, with an estimated 460 brands and thousands of flavors available for sale in brick-and-mortar “vape” shops, in chain convenience stores, as well as from online vendors (Herzog et al., 2014a, Zhu et al., 2014).
Historically, the e-cigarette industry has not been subject to regulation or advertising restrictions, which has encouraged uncontrolled market expansion. As a result, advertising expenditures tripled from 2011 to 2012, when the industry spent $18.3 million on magazine, television, newspaper and Internet ads (Kim et al., 2014). Although e-cigarette Internet advertising expenditures are lower than expenditures in traditional media formats (i.e., print, TV), the Internet's growth potential as a cheap and accessible marketing tool to promote e-cigarette uptake needs to be examined. In fact, industry analysts now estimate that online sales make up approximately 25–30% of the $2.2B e-cigarette market, though exact figures are difficult to track (Herzog et al., 2014a, Herzog et al., 2014b). Another study examining tobacco and e-cigarette online banner/video advertisements in the USA and Canada found that an estimated $2 million was spent by the industry between 2012 and 2013 on the web (Richardson et al., 2015).
As e-cigarette sales have increased, so have calls for Federal regulation of this new nicotine delivery technology. In April, 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed regulations that for the first time would govern the use, sale, marketing, and manufacturing of e-cigarettes, and will likely establish a minimum purchasing age, require product package warnings, and set product standards once promulgated (Cobb et al., 2015, Deeming Tobacco Products, 2014). Importantly, the proposed regulations do not specifically regulate or prohibit online e-cigarette sales, though their general requirements could interpreted as applicable to online vendors (“Deeming Tobacco Products To Be Subject to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act,” 2014). Hence, given the growth of the e-cigarette market and ubiquitous access online, a more detailed assessment of the e-cigarette e-commerce marketplace is critical to inform interpretation of FDA regulations as well as in guiding future regulatory science.
To date, a handful of studies have attempted to describe e-cigarette Internet vendors and their online marketing by focusing on: the number of product brands; presence of flavors, nicotine strengths and ingredients; product claims; representation of health claims; volume and topic areas/themes of online marketing; assessing characteristics of online banner/video advertisement; and examining the relationships between affiliate networks and Internet vendors (Cobb et al., 2015, Grana and Ling, 2014, Richardson et al., 2015, Zhu et al., 2014). Expanding on this research, this study describes additional e-cigarette Internet vendor characteristics not previously explored, including vendor geographic locations, use of online sales promotion strategies, use of social networking platforms for marketing, and reexamining age verification processes in order to further inform future policy making on this issue.
Section snippets
Structured web searches and vendor identification
The first phase of this study involved conducting structured Internet search engine queries using the five most popular e-cigarette-related key search terms “e cig”, “e cigarette”, “ecig”, “vape” and “vaping” based on results from Google Trends on search term interest over the past 12 months. We then used Google search engine to query these popular e-cigarette-related search terms based upon Google's overwhelming popularity among English-speaking Internet users and its large volume of global
Results
Applying our search query strategy yielded a total of 246 website links for review. Websites featuring news articles (e.g., Reuters), reference sites (e.g., Wikipedia) or that constituted health or information-only sites (e.g., WebMD, FDA website) were excluded (n = 79), leaving 167 remaining websites for further in-depth review. An additional 110 websites were excluded due to the following criteria: duplicate sites; marketing affiliate sites not directly selling e-cigarettes but that provided a
Discussion
The aim of this study was to expand understanding of the e-cigarette Internet vendor environment in order to identify unique marketing characteristics utilized by this alternative form of access. The results of this study also inform the applicability of proposed FDA e-cigarette rules in the context of online sales, identify possible regulatory gaps, and may aid in the development of future regulatory science mechanisms to address unique challenges of online promotion and sale of e-cigarettes.
Role of funding source
Nothing declared.
Authors’ contribution
We note that with respect to author contributions, Tim K. Mackey (TM) and Angela Miner (AM) jointly conceived the study, TM, AM, and Raphael Cuomo (RC) jointly wrote the manuscript, TM, AM, and RC jointly edited the manuscript, TM, AM, and RC jointly conducted the data analyses, and TM supervised its legal and policy analysis.
Conflict of interest
Nothing declared.
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Supplementary materials for this article can be found by accessing the online version of this paper.