Does cigarette package design matter?

Ben Goldacre’s latest Bad Science column takes on the new English and Welsh rules prohibiting the display of cigarette packages in stores and the requirement that all cigarettes be sold in generic packaging. While various people in the tobacco industry have protested this move on the grounds that it will make it easier to counterfeit cigarettes (a pretty thin objection, IMO), Goldacre points out a way in which this will significantly improve the public’s understanding of the risks from tobacco:

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not, sadly, their own facts. Cigarette packaging has been used for brand building and sales expansion, and that is bad enough: but it has also been used for many decades to sell the crucial lie that cigarettes which are “light”, “mild”, “silver”, and the rest, are somehow “safer”.

This is one of the most important con tricks of all time: because people base real world decisions on it, even though low tar cigarettes are just as bad for you as normal cigarettes, as we have known for decades now. Manufacturers’ gimmicks, like the holes on the filter by your fingers, confuse laboratory smoking machines, but not people. Smokers who switch to lower tar brands compensate with larger, faster, deeper inhalations, and by smoking more cigarettes. The collected data from a million people shows that those who smoke low tar and “ultra-light” cigarettes get lung cancer at the same rate as people who smoke “normal” cigarettes. They are also, paradoxically, less likely to give up smoking…

If you’re in doubt of the impact this branding can have, “brand imagery” studies show that when participants smoke the exact same cigarettes presented in lighter coloured packs, or in packs with “mild” in the name, they rate the smoke as lighter and less harsh, simply through the power of suggestion. These illusory perceptions of mildness, of course, further reinforce the false belief that the cigarettes are healthier.

But these aren’t the only reasons why banning a few words from packaging isn’t enough. A study on 600 adolescents, for example, found that plain packages increase the noticability, recall, and credibility of warning labels.

Why cigarette packs matter