Miriam Goldstein

February 9, 2014

Inevitably Immoral: Why Teague and R.J. Reynolds Did Not Cause All Teens to Start Smoking
but Are Guilty Anyway
We should not in any way influence non-smokers to start smoking,1 insists Claude
Teague, assistant director of research at R.J. Reynolds,2 in his 1973 research planning memo
titled Some Thoughts about New Brands of Cigarettes for the Youth Market. Instead, he
maintains that the cigarette giants only goal is to encourage teens, who would inevitably
become smokers anyway, to choose their brand over the competition. Teague relied on statistics
revealing that the rate at which individuals twenty-one and under were becoming smokers was
stable or even increasing despite bans on promotion of cigarettes to them to reassure himself
and the company that they were doing nothing immoral or unethical in attempting to advertise
to youth.3 Historian Robert Proctor, who recently published a book about the horrors of the
cigarette industry, Golden Holocaust, would argue against the notion that youth marketing does
not encourage teenagers to start smoking. He calls the idea that advertising wont cause anyone
to try smokinga bizarre violation of common sense,4 and even cites a former global
advertising agency CEO who reveals his amusement at the suggestion that advertising, a
function that has been shown to increase consumption of virtually every other product, somehow
miraculously fails to work for tobacco products.5 On the other hand, Proctor also
acknowledges that, according to a U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report, the
number of American teens using cigarettes had increased from three million in 1968 to four
million by 1970,6 even though cigarette companies did not begin to target this demographic until
the 1970s.7 How does one explain this enormous leap in the absence of youth-directed
marketing if the initiation of teens into the smoking world was not, as Teague asserts,
unavoidable? One way to interpret this evidence is to consider the influence of indirect
marketing. By 1973, smoking had become normalized, deeply embedded in popular culture.8
Young people did not need conscious marketing efforts to convince them to start smoking when
smoking was everywhere. This is not to suggest that ad campaigns did not increase the number
of smokers in the world, and for this reason, Teague and the rest of R.J. Reynolds are not as free
of blame as Teague suggests in fact, far from it. They were, after all, along with other giants in
the cigarette industry, the ones who promoted smoking in earlier years to such an extent that it
became ubiquitous.9 On the surface, Teagues memo is about new cigarette design and marketing
strategies devised to encourage teens to start smoking Reynolds brand cigarettes. More
importantly though, by pointing out those psychological effects of smoking that Teague hopes
to capitalize on, this memo reveals why there was no way for many teens to escape cigarettes,
even without the added influence of deliberate youth advertising. Each social factor that Teague
addresses would not have had marketing power if not for the pervasiveness of cigarettes that had
been established long before.
1

Claude E. Teague, Jr., Some Thoughts about New Brands of Cigarettes for the Youth Market, February 2, 1973,
1.
2
Robert N. Proctor, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011), 196.
3
Teague, Cigarettes for the Youth Market, 1.
4
Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 68-69.
5
Ibid., 69.
6
Ibid., 312-313.
7
Ibid., 75.
8
Ibid., 7.
9
Ibid., 56-87.

Miriam Goldstein

February 9, 2014

When Teague drafted this memo to the Research, TPD, Marketing and Management
departments,10 he had one question on his mind: How can Reynolds make sure that it gets to the
pre-smokers first, and how can it retain these customers as they become learners and
beyond? Pre-smokers is the term that Teague gives to individuals who have just begun their
smoking habit. At this point, they are the most susceptible to marketing, because the negative
physical aspects of smoking have not yet begun to take hold, and the psychosocial factors that
encouraged them to try that first cigarette are working at their finest. As pre-smokers become
learners, they begin to experience some of those unpleasant or awkward physical effects of
smoking.11 Teague names irritation, unpleasant flavor, and astringency as factors that, if not for
some outside motivating factors, might deter learners on the path to addiction.12 Although
Teague does reserve a portion of this memo for suggestions for making cigarettes more
physically appealing to learners (blander smoke, improved flavor, etc.), he is also aware that
psychological effectsprovide sufficient motivation during the learning period to keep the
learner going, despite the physical unpleasantness and awkwardness of the period.13 Therefore,
the key to getting new smokers to try and then continue using Reynolds cigarettes is to play up
those psychological benefits (Teague names four of them) that already appeal to new and
potential smokers. But just how did those positive psychological effects get there in the first
place?
Through his explanation of how the company could employ psychological effects in
marketing a new brand of cigarettes to youth, Teague is ultimately (albeit indirectly) revealing
the larger lack of need for such advertising, due to cigarettes self-perpetuating nature. This is
not referring to the form of self-perpetuation that Teague touches on the cigarettes addictive
qualities that get individuals hooked for life14 but instead to the cigarettes ability to
automatically break into the next generation (and even Proctor notes that the teen of the late
1960s was starting to smoke earlier than his 1950s forbearer15). Cigarettes have this power
because they are already deeply ingrained in society. Accordingly, when Teague promotes the
emphasis of group identification as a possible marketing tactic, he is relying on the fact that
ones closest associates were already smoking.16 Proctor demonstrates this effect when he
points out that sibling smoking was such a strong predictor that girls with an older brother or
sister smokingwere more than four times as likely to smoke as girls with smoke-free older
siblings.17
Another notion that Teague wished to utilize, that of cigarettes as a stress reliever, was
also already there by the time that the teens of the seventies came around. According to Proctor,
by 1958, there was already a public conception of the cigarette as something that relieves
tension, permits one to relax, and is comforting when alone or idle,18 and kids did not need a
cigarette manufacturer to tell them how stress-relieving smoking could be when they likely saw
their parents come home and light up after a long day at the office. They may not have

10

Teague, Cigarettes for the Youth Market, 11.

Ibid., 2.
12
Ibid., 4-5.
13
Ibid., 2.
14
Ibid.
15
Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 75.
16
Teague, Cigarettes for the Youth Market, 6.
17
Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 313.
18
Ibid., 308.
11

Miriam Goldstein

February 9, 2014

considered the fact that this relief was actually alleviation of withdrawal,19 but it did the trick
nonetheless in convincing youngsters that cigarettes could help them unwind.
Teague also aimed to take advantage of the traditionallystrong promotional theme of
self-image enhancement. The idea behind this was that teens wanted to be everything that they
were not independent, attractive, adventurous, etc. and if the company could convince these
impressionable adolescents that cigarettes would provide them with all this and more, they would
be eager to partake in them.20 Of course, Proctor makes it quite obvious that there was eventually
a great deal of advertising directed toward this cause, including the 1987 introduction of Joe
Camel, the hipper, more modern face of Reynolds cigarettes.21 However, in 1973, much of the
real impact came from previous marketing attempts that were not part of any new youth-directed
ad campaign. Although the featuring of cigarettes in movies was initially promoted by the
tobacco industry, smoking eventually became such a common part of life (and therefore film)
that it did not need to be. The cigarettes 1920s Hollywood debut22 would eventually lead to
everyones favorite stars smoking it up on the big screen. With youngsters often looking up to
celebrities as the coolest of the cool, it is no wonder that epidemiologists have suggested that
half of all new smokers start as a result of exposure to smoking in Hollywood films,23 a
summation which Proctor derives from a 2006 review published in the journal Pediatrics.24
Although this is more recent data, the pervasiveness of smoking in earlier films would seem to
suggest that these statistics can also be applied, at least to some extent, to the new smokers of the
1970s. Cigarettes were already enjoying their own image enhancement long before Teagues
memorandum came to be.
Explanation enough for the earlier impact of Teagues final psychological effect
experimentation can be found in the ideas that this paper has already highlighted. Teague
professes that young people experiment with smoking, simply because it is there and they want
to know more about it. Teague hoped to create a new brand offering something novel and
different, 25 but he forgot (or neglected to mention) that cigarettes in of themselves are novel
and different to anyone who is just beginning to smoke them. With a yearly consumption rate of
537 billion cigarettes by 1970,26 they were truly everywhere, and it was all too easy for that
curious teen to get a hold of them. Cigarettes were marketing themselves, even in the absence of
Teagues targeting of the twenty-one and under population.
Once again, evidence that the cigarette market would have still gained many teenage
customers even if it had not actively pursued them should not by any means excuse the industry
from the role that it played. Aside from the fact that the industrys own earlier promotion and
normalization of cigarettes had made the above-mentioned psychological effects of smoking
possible, it is also important to look at the effects that youth-focused marketing had on the
individual. Even if most of the people targeted by Teagues campaign would have begun
smoking without it, there were still some who would not have. Whether it was a slight
improvement in flavor or a novel design of a cigarette pack that was enough to turn one learner
into a full-fledged smoker does not matter. The fact is that, if lives on their own are valuable,
19

Ibid., 360.
Teague, Cigarettes for the Youth Market, 7.
21
Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 78-81.
22
Ibid., 63.
23
Ibid., 66.
24
Ibid., 571.
25
Teague, Cigarettes for the Youth Market, 7 (emphasis added).
26
Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 57.
20

Miriam Goldstein

February 9, 2014

campaigns targeting young people are guilty of taking them. Teague may have played oblivious
to the alleged risk of smoking,27 but the truth is, he of all people, the creator of the [then]
most comprehensive summary of experimental tobacco cancer research,28 knew just how
dangerous cigarettes really are. The blood of each life his youth campaign stole is on his hands.

27
28

Teague, Cigarettes for the Youth Market, 8.

Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 193.