The Marlboro Man: Rebranding a Woman’s Cigarette as Frontier Manhood

Marlboro was introduced in the 1920s as a woman's cigarette, with a red band on the filter designed to conceal lipstick marks and the slogan Mild as May. It sold poorly and was nearly discontinued.

In the early 1950s, after the cancer studies, filtered cigarettes became commercially essential — a filter was the industry's answer to health anxiety. Philip Morris had a filter brand already, and it had a problem: filters were coded as feminine and as an admission of weakness, and men, who were most of the market, would not buy one.

The agency was Leo Burnett in Chicago, and the brief was psychological rather than commercial.

Burnett's answer was to attach the most unambiguously masculine imagery available. The first campaign in 1955 used a range of rugged men — a sea captain, a construction worker, a pilot — each photographed with a tattoo on the back of the hand, which signalled a history the viewer could not see. Within a few years the campaign narrowed to the cowboy, and Marlboro Country ran until 1999.

Marlboro went from a fraction of a percent of the American market to the best-selling cigarette in the world.

The mechanism is symbolic self-completion, in Wicklund and Gollwitzer's account: people who feel their claim to an identity is incomplete acquire and display symbols associated with it, and the more insecure the claim, the stronger the acquisition. The cowboy is autonomy, competence, solitude and hardness — precisely the properties a filter tip denies.

What matters for this guide is the second-order consequence, which is why identity-based advertising is so much more durable than product-based advertising.

A person who has bought a product on the basis of its features can be argued out of it by better features. A person who has bought a product as a statement about who they are cannot, because the counter-argument is received as an attack on the self. Public health messaging against Marlboro was not competing with a claim about tar; it was competing with an identity, and identity-protective cognition — chapter 210's mechanism — means that evidence against it strengthens the commitment.

At least four men who played the Marlboro Man died of smoking-related disease. The campaign's internal strategy documents were released through litigation and are in the tobacco archives.