UNIVERSITY OF CANTABRIA, SPAIN JANUARY 2017

FINAL PROJECT CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

UNIVERSITY OF CANTABRIA, SPAIN JANUARY 2017

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Studying the variables that affects tobacco purchasing decision: The

case of Marlboro

Oscar Di Pasquale Thomas Bauer

Sara Temes Carrera Umberto Ruggeri Federico Chiarelli

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Index

1. Introduction

1.1. Explication of the chosen topic 1.2. Mentioning the theories which are going to be used

2. Main part

2.1. Describing the brand “Marlboro” and their influence on society

2.1.1. History 2.1.2. Products

2.2. Personality traits

2.2.1. Big 5 test 2.2.2. Explanation of the results

2.3. Motivation

2.3.1. Classification of the satisfaction of needs 2.3.2. Cognitive dissonance

2.4. Socialization

2.4.1. Groups 2.4.1.1. Group membership and individual behavior 2.4.1.2. Types of (indirect) reference groups and influence

2.4.2. Family 2.4.2.1. Parental smoking as a role model 2.4.2.2. Harmful effect of exposure: impact of passive smoking

2.5. Implementation of the theory - investigation of Marlboro commercials

3. Conclusion

3.1. Results 3.2. Expectations

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1. Introduction

The habit of smoking is considered to be a compulsive behavior, and both, a physical and a psychological addiction. Therefore, smoking as a long-term addiction has serious health consequences as heart and lung illnesses like asthma and cancer, just to mention a few. There are several causes behind why people start smoking as social influence (friends, family, role models…)=peer pressure, a way to get acceptance of the group, a way of rebellion, a way of relieving stress and anxiety, or even just for fun or curiosity. In Spain, according to the survey conducted by the Spanish Ministry of Health, Equality and Social Policy (Encuesta Nacional de Salud) almost 30% of adult population smokes and each year, over 60.000 people die due to (direct connected factors) smoking repercussion. In the last years, the Government has implement new laws concerning the sale, supply, consumption and advertising of tobacco products, the most relevant was introduced 5 years ago: on January 2, 2011, when Spain finally banned smoking (full ban on smoking) in all enclosed public spaces, including bars and restaurants.

1.1. Explication of the chosen topic

The question is: why people continue smoking in despite of knowing it is bad for one’s health (and also for one’s pocket)? Is the nicotine so powerful? Trying to get to know the explanation we will analyze the variables that we consider important for the decision making process. To concretize the project we chose the brand “Marlboro”, because it was and is one of the most influential brands when it comes to this issue.

1.2. Mentioning the theories which are going to be used Furthermore we decided to go into detail about the following aspects learnt in the subject. First of all we want to study the influences of “personality traits”, doing the “Big-5-Test” (smokers vs. non-smokers) and the brand personality variable. Secondly we want to study the topic “motivation” and in this case we will make a classification of the satisfaction of needs and a look on the cognitive dissonance. The next one will be “socialization”. Therefore we thought to use influence of the groups in the decision-making process. The last topic we want to study is “family” as a strong external influence. Finally, in the conclusion, we will take a look back at the results of our work and we will interpret those referring to the spoken theories.

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2. Main part

2.1. Describing the brand “Marlboro” and their influence on society

Before explaining our investigation in a more detailed way, a brief overview of the brand "Marlboro" is needed to having a deeper understanding of the influence of corporations when it comes to purchasing-decisions.

2.1.1. History

The brand was created by Philip Morris International. A company that started in 1847 as a little shop located in London and was later, in 1919, acquired by a new firm owned by American shareholders. From that moment the company began to manufacture cigarettes in its factory in Richmond, Virginia under the name of Philip Morris & Co. Ltd. Inc. - Finally in 1924 the company’s most famous brand, Marlboro, was introduced. This event caused the firm to start growing and in 1950 decided to jump in manufacturing and selling its products around the world launching Philip Morris International. The company was introduced in Spain in 1971. Nowadays Philip Morris is the biggest cigarette company in the world and Marlboro is considered to be the world’s number one cigarette brand. In our country it is sell in tobacco shops with a price of over 5,10€.

2.1.2. Products

The brand keeps innovating with the implementation in 2008 of a new brand architecture with three defined identities: “Flavor”, “Gold” and “Fresh” that provides consumers a wide range of options.

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It has also launched another lines as: “Marlboro Touch” (slimmer Marlboro cigarettes), “Advance” (launched in Malaysia with a Recessed Filter), “W-burst” (Launched in Japan, with two capsules in the filter), “Kretek Mint” (Launched in Mexico, with a menthol flavor), and “Premium black”. So to say, the mentioned brand developed a huge influence all around the world and we will use it as our sample brand to explore e. g. also the usage of the theory in commercials.

2.2. Personality traits

To start with, the personality of an individual leads to different purchasing decisions, what will be shown in the following part. The goal of this part of the work is trying to identify the differences in the personality traits of a smoker and of a non-smoker.

A person can be defined by the profile of his traits.

2.2.1. Big 5 test

For this reason we administered the big five test, invented by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, to two members of the group belonging to the two extremes categories.

This test is able to identify five of the most relevant characteristics of human’s personality and to give them a score that can tell us how intense is each of those traits in the individual’s personality.

This approach is one of the most shared and used, both at a theoretical and practical level. As a sample we made a research on a non-smoking person and a smoking person.

The results are the following:

Non-smoker test:

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Smoker test:

Even if the sample used for this analysis is not big enough to take the results as an absolute truth, it is still interesting to comment the scores percentiles and try to find out some kind of connection within personality traits and smoke addiction.

2.2.2. Explanation of the results

As we can observe, the scores are different in all of the factors, those being explained by many variables affecting personality and not only by the smoking addiction.

What is worth of observation is the great difference detected in the two traits of emotional stability and agreeableness.

From the analysis of this two factors is possible to conclude that a smoker could be more emotionally stable compared with a non-smoker, because the act of smoking is often used as a way to repress and reduce the stress and the strong feelings in general, giving to the addicted person a sensation of temporary relief.

Regarding the second factor of interest, we can state that a person high in agreeableness is friendly and optimistic and that low scorers are critical and aggressive.

One of the most common reasons that pushes people to start smoking is the need and the research of companionship and friendship.

The high score obtained in this trait from the smoker person it might be related with his need for integration in his desired group and in the society in general.

This need at the same time led him to start smoking.

In conclusion we can confirm that there is a positive correlation between one’s personality and his addiction to cigarettes, at least within the framework taken in consideration.

It might be interesting to extend this study to a bigger sample, so that this conclusion could have a greater credibility and could be used to help solving the problem of smoking habit once and for all.

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2.3. Motivation

Studying the consumer behaviour of the smokers is important to analyze the internal and the external variables that affect the process of decision making. Motivation is an internal variable that is related with psychology and basically is the mixture of wants, needs and drives within the individual which seek satisfaction through experiences or objects. These things may be less important in absolute terms but they will be valued by the satisfaction with which they are associated and for that reason marketers try to persuade consumers that the use of their product will satisfy certain needs. In Addition, the psychological motivations that drive consumers to smoke are learned and below we provide a brief analysis about how can they lead people to smoke.

2.3.1. Classification of the satisfaction of needs

Nowadays people have the first contact with cigarettes very early, at about 12 years old. It has become a kind of rite of passage that marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence. Teenagers, in fact, start smoking to feel older, independent and socially accepted by peer groups. Most of times they fall into a smoking addiction that makes them continue smoking in the adulthood. In this stage motivations slightly change toward freedom and socialization needs that often keep people smoking for many and many years.

We can classify the motivations of these two stages in a hierarchy scale elaborated by Maslow that is composed by macro-classes of needs: survival, social and ego. When people smoke they satisfy the second step of the scale which contain the social needs of companionship and esteem.

Teenagers start to smoke primarily due to the need of get the membership in the “adults” group and in the big family of the smokers (companionship). Once in the group, they also meet the need to be appreciated by others (esteem) and this increase a lot their self-esteem. They also begin because they imitate others and here comes the importance of external influence of which we speak in the other chapters.

When teenagers get adults most of times have developed an addiction and they keep continue smoking mainly to remain part of the smokers group due to socialization needs (companionship). In other words, they smoke to have something in common with others so that it’s easier to meet new people and make friends. Another reason why smokers love smoking is that they like taking some time for themselves and escape from all their problems (sense of freedom).

2.3.2. Cognitive dissonance

An important aspect to be emphasized is the phenomenon called “cognitive dissonance”. It is when someone has simultaneously contradictory beliefs and cognitions. In this case, people know that smoke it’s not healthy but they keep smoking and they experiment this dissonance. How do they deal with it? Smokers tend to alter the reality intentionally or they invent many excuses just to get rid of the

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cognitive dissonance. For example they say: "i know a 70 years old man who smokes since he was 20 and who is very healthy" or they reduce the importance of the facts saying that is better to "live for today" than to "save for tomorrow” or “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer”.

2.4. Socialization

After we investigated the internal factors, we want to focus on the external influence. Socialization is one of the key factors when it comes to the decision of buying cigarettes. Therefore we want to look at the different dimensions of groups before we focus on a specific one - the family. First of all "Socialization" needs to be described more clear. As the topic implies it's complexity, there are a lot of researchers like e. g. Freud, Piaget or Kohlberg, who tried to define the process more precise. There are different approaches on the topic like cognitive -, moral - or identity development theories, but generally speaking one can say socialization "looks at how the self , or one’s identity, self-concept, and self-image, develops. These explanations stress that we learn how to interact by first interacting with others and that we do so by using this interaction to gain an idea of who we are and what they expect of us." Thus implies that those bespoken interactions need other persons mostly concentrated and summed up in groups. To add, socialization is also mentioned as " a learning process, one that involves development or changes in the individual’s sense of self”, which makes another link to the importance of groups. This is because we can assume that learning is, in this case, an observational process on group members, who are part of the aimed group and smoke. Therefore wrong conclusions are drawn by the person who observes and connects smoking with positive attitudes rather than negative. Speaking about consumer socialization, there are variables which are important for the grown-ups like social/family influence, shopping/brand importance and media (TV, Internet). But all those are varying by gender, age, money available and how time is spent, studies show.

2.4.1. Groups As defined those subjects have common purpose, goals or tasks and interact relatively exclusive in a given context . So to say, mostly young people start to smoke to get into one of these groups no matter if it is a formal, informal or permanent group. Referring to that fact teenagers who are exploring their environment and try to get connections with other ones, mostly with the same age or older ones, who they admire for different reasons, smoking is the one behavior, which makes it as easy as possible to join those groups, in a lot of cases. This is due to the fact that especially commercials, for which kids and young adults are open to, try to present smoking as grown-up and cool (explained later on) trait, teens are up to have. This goes way beyond just experimenting and trying new things, to what smoking is also related. Later on, adults keep using the habit of smoking to get in touch with different kind of groups referring to the positive experiences the made in the past, no matter how the relationship or tasks of the group are.

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2.4.1.1. Group membership and individual behavior

Rather than achieving goals and gaining status the young smokers are trying to obtain friendship, which plays one of the most important roles, when It comes to socializing in the teenagers years. The desire for this goal is so high, that they ignore the long-term health risks of it, as seen on a daily base. Furthermore, referring to the "WHO Healthy Policy Series "In relation to gender, the experimentation rates for boys substantially exceed those for girls at each age level". One possible explanation could be, that boys are having a harder time integration in different kind of groups than girls, due to the fact that they cannot adapt so fast and good then girls, but still want the desired membership. Especially strong bonds of belonging to a group and avoid isolation are playing the biggest role throughout the whole period of life.

2.4.1.2. Types of (indirect) reference groups and influence Furthermore, speaking about reference groups, there are a few which stand out, when it comes to socializing and smoking. There is most likely not difference in a primary or secondary group. Which seems quite clear is that it will be a aspiration group, which they want to be part in, most probably an informal group at the beginning, but later on in life, as learnt so, also formal groups. A special group which causes danger of drawing the wrong conclusions and start to smoke, is when celebrities are shown in media with cigarettes. Those indirect reference groups like e. g. actors are grabbing special attention, create awareness and oneself tends to identify with them. Thus people want to be like them and smoke to appear like them and their attitudes. Normative influence has most probably the biggest influence in achieving to join a group by conforming to the group norms, which is in a lot of cases smoking as a common signal of recognition and entry possibility. Thus being said, after learnt that smoking can provide entrance in certain groups, people a likely to continue with this behavior in their adult life, even if it is not necessary anymore because of other things worth accepting the person.

2.4.2. Family

As we have seen the initiation of smoking is influenced and mediated through a number of important factors, among them, the influence of both parents and peers is remarkable.

Family, as we know, is the most relevant social group in terms of consumption. In the full nest stage of family life cycle parents (and other relatives) influence the behavior of their children in all senses. Not only they teach us how to behave as consumers (consumer socialization: purchasing behaviors are passed from one generation to another) but also their performance may affect us significantly in other ways.

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2.4.2.1. Parental smoking as role modelling

It is clear that, if parents smoke, children will be more likely to start smoking, especially in teenage years. Having a history of smoking family increases the belief that smoking will be socially rewarded, and that cigarettes can be obtained and smoked with relative impunity.

A study conducted by Chassin et al. found that young adult smokers with a history of family smoking tended to smoke more cigarettes in an average day, smoke for more years and perceived themselves as more addicted than smokers without a parental history of smoking.

2.4.2.2. Harmful effect of exposure: impact of passive smoking.

It is important to remark that, in the issue in hand, smoking not only influences the health status of individual smokers, it also indirectly affects those within the immediate environment. This means that, if you smoke nearby your family you will both develop on them an adverse influence which can lead to make them became potential smokers and also make them breathe secondhand smoke, that means they will be passive and involuntary smoking. Furthermore, smoking parents will lead to lower income households.

Summing up: familial and genetic factors influence the likelihood of developing tobacco addiction. Together, these factors are significant influences on the initiation of smoking and on the development of addiction. In fact, the heritability of smoking has been estimated to be about 50–70%.

2.5. Implementation of the theory - investigation of commercials from "Marlboro"

After we used the learnt theory on our chosen topic we want now explain some commercials from the brand "Marlboro" as our sample, to see how it influences the process of purchasing when it comes to the habit of smoking.

Investigating on the following poster and commercial video clip:

https://goo.gl/tgaCZe “Marlboro cigarettes 1993 - Advertisement without product.”

And the following poster (source):

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The brand was identified as a women’s cigarette until 1950’s, when Philip Morris launched a new campaign of filtered cigarettes in which were used a lineup of mainly figures like cowboys and sea captains, to change their reputation.

Cowboys and horses were widely used in Marlboro advertisement, because they symbolize power and virility. Landscapes were used as well because they transmit freedom and liberty.

Furthermore, one can assume, showing a middle-aged man in the commercials handling the wild nature without any doubt and stress showing no emotions, the customers or viewers of the commercial could pretend, that the cowboy gets his unshakable confidence of one tiny little detail, what is only hinted - the cigarette he smokes. By having this trait, a person seems to be absolutely desirable and all the other ones want to be like him: Cool, whatever comes. Therefore it is a product, which should be used by all, to achieve those kind of personality.

Additionally, according to many studies about the psychology of the colors in branding and marketing, orange brings motivation, freedom and fervency. That is the reason why they used it in the background of the adv.

Using the previous marketing strategies, Marlboro tried to relate the characteristics of virility, freedom and power to the brand to attract the consumers that want to achieve this features, giving a personality and a symbolic value to the product. In other words, the subliminal message that Marlboro brings is: if you smoke our cigarettes you will be viril, free, powerful and cool.

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3. Conclusion

To finish our work, we would like to sum up our results and conclude with the final thoughts.

3.1. Results

In the end we can say that people start smoking because of a combination of external and internal influences (family, friends, adv…) and they keep continue basically because of membership need and addiction to nicotine. Throughout the advertisements, brands try to associate some personality traits to their imagine in order to attract a precise segment of consumers. Marlboro, for example, associates the traits of power, freedom, virility and coolness to the brand and attracts principally young men who desire these traits. Even if the taste of the flavor of smoking as it isolated habit of enjoyment is for most people not desirable, the action itself brings deeply gratification by giving oneself a break or a reward in having a cigarette. Additionally it brings socially acceptance which leads to friends and companionship. Those facts are used, as shown above, by companies which produce cigarettes. Over the past centuries they created an imagine of a typical customer in the social mind, which is hard to get rid of. Advertising campaigns and movie clips have managed to associate the image of a smoker with the characteristics of power, freedom and coolness. But not only men have been taken into consideration. I seems like also women got more emancipated by smoking showing independence.

3.2. Expectations

There is a clear trend recognizable in a falling interest of purchasing of cigarettes. Nowadays the growing-up generation is more into sustainability and living a healthy life, which is the new "cool", then showing it by smoking. Furthermore the governments all around the world are developing even harder restrictions in commercials for cigarettes which leads also in a downturn of purchasing cigarettes. Nevertheless, it is hard to get rid of smoking in a society. On the one hand, companies are learning more about human behavior and how to use those information to develop better methods of commercials. On the other hand, as we could see in our group work, the habit of smoking is to a certain extend deeply connected with personality, socializing and confidence, so therefore it will be really hard to get loose of cigarettes in general, especially it is also a historical and cultural aspect.

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Bibliography

Papers:

1. Dotson, Hyatt: "Mayor influence factors in children's consumer socialization" out of the Journal of Consumer Marketing, page 35, January 2005.

2. Currie, Hurrelmann, Settertobulte, Smith, Todd: "Health and Health Behaviour among Young People" a WHO Cross-National-Study (HBSC) International Report, Regional Office for Europe, 2000.

Websites (all checked at 9th January 2017):

1. http://www.1dental.com/blog/2016/02/03/what-college-students-say-about-smoking-and-dental-health/

2. http://www.lne.es/vida-y-estilo/salud/2016/05/31/consumo-tabaco-espana/1935221.html

3. http://healthliteracy.worlded.org/docs/tobacco/Unit3/1why_people_smoke.html 4. http://www.pmi.com/eng/our_products/pages/our_brands.aspx 5. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957583905001089 6. http://www.focusjunior.it/tecnologia/perche-la-gente-continua-a-fumare 7. http://www.amando.it/salute/benessere/fumo-eta-giovanile.html 8. https://www.2knowmyself.com/cognitive_dissonance_and_smoking 9. http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html 10. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233843 11. http://www.sociology.org/what-is-socialization/ 12. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/731441_5 13. http://2012books.lardbucket.org/pdfs/sociology-brief-edition-v1.1.pdf