Friday, March 15, 2019

What do Kool-Aid and Marlboro have in common? The tobacco industry...

A new paper out this week in the BMJ reveals how the tobacco industry applied their marketing tactics to sugar sweetened beverages and turned generations of children into customers.

Nguyen Kim H, Glantz Stanton A, Palmer Casey N, Schmidt Laura A. Tobacco industry involvement in children’s sugary drinks market BMJ 2019; 364 :l736.

Kim H Nguyen of UCSF's Philip R Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, and colleagues Laura Schmidt, Casey Palmer and Stanton Glantz dug into the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents to show that many of today’s leading children’s drink brands were once owned and developed by tobacco companies. The tobacco companies initially acquired soft drink brands to diversify and documents show they applied marketing strategies aimed at kids (colors, flavors, cartoon characters) to promote and develop the brands. Although the brands have since been sold to food companies, the marketing techniques remain in use.

New York Times piece on the article:
Jacobs, Andrew. How Big Tobacco Hooked Children on Sugary Drinks - New York Times, March 14, 2019

Example = The Evolution of Advertising for Hawaiian Punch