WOULD cigarettes be as alluring if all brands came in the same plain grey packaging? Such standardisation could become mandatory following research showing that consumers are still taken in by subliminal packaging messages that lead them to think some brands are less harmful than others.
More than 40 countries have banned tobacco companies from advertising brands as “mild” or “low tar” following research showing they were all equally harmful.
To see whether more subtle packaging cues are influencing consumers, and Carla Parkinson at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, created fictitious cigarette packets bearing words now commonly used on real packets, such as “smooth” or “silver”. When shoppers in Ontario were asked to select the healthiest brands, they invariably picked those with light-coloured packaging or bearing words subliminally suggestive of good health ().
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Hammond says standardisation is the only way to stamp out these tricks. “The reasoning is that people associate use of different colours or wording with different levels of risk, but the one thing we’ve learned is that all brands are equally lethal,” he says. Many countries, including the UK, Canada and Australia, are already considering standardisation, Hammond adds.
