Tobacco Brands Under Fire

The heat is on cigarette-makers. But is it just a lot of crusaders blowing smoke?

First, to Australia, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd intends to strip all logos and designs from cigarette packaging. How did the tobacco brands react?

It doesn't matter, mate, because Rudd predicts their reaction, saying, "Now the big tobacco companies are going to go out there and whinge, whine, complain, consider every form of legal action known to man. That's par for course."

His government, which will enforce the logo ban on July 1, 2012, "will not be intimidated by any big tobacco company trying to get in the road of doing the right thing."

Hear that? They're doing "the right thing."

When a tobacco company finally "whined" a response, it was hardly "every form of legal action known to man."

A spokesperson for Imperial Tobacco Australia reasoned that "Introducing plain packaging just takes away the ability of a consumer to identify our brand from another brand."

In this case, doing "the right thing" means splitting the middle of a constituency to assume the maximum number of votes.

"The right thing" from a health perspective would be to ban tobacco sales completely. "The right thing" from a free market angle would be to let consumers make informed choices.

Rudd can't have it both ways, although Australia's new cigarette packaging rules also include a 25% tax hike, pushing the cost of smoking down under to $15.40 per package.

And now to Europe, where regulators are weighing the possibility of taking action against the Ferrari F1 racing team over a barcode logo on its car that many claim is a Marlboro ad. In 2002 the EU banned tobacco advertising in sports.

Despite the ban, Marlboro maintains its Ferrari team sponsorship. It's this continuing relationship that has led to the reasonable assumption the barcode is an ad.

Indeed, almost any Marlboro smoker would immediately identify the particular mark and colors as those of a Marlboro pack's bottom, going to show that a brand is about more than a name or a "logo." Then again, a non-smoker would likely never make the connection.

Ironically, the Ferrari example demonstrates much of the futility of the ban under consideration in Australia.

After all, a "logo" is only a thing manufactured by the brand itself. Consumers are also responsible for assigning brand-identifying characteristics—and you cannot legislate consumer sentiment, yet.

[Update: Australia's Commonwealth cousin in Canada is now pondering logo-free cigarettes, too.]