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Laura Dennison

Professor Patterson

Intro to Visual Thinking

4 December 2020

JUUL’s Smoke and Mirrors’ Success

Reference image
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When I look at the images above, the words that come to mind are youthfulness,

excitement, euphoria, coolness, and basically a utopia where diversity is celebrated. It doesn’t

make me to think about how one JUUL pod cartridge contains the same amount of nicotine as

twenty cigarettes nor how this whole ad campaign was supposed to be designed for adults to

make the “switch” to quitting smoking and not to market to young non-smokers. (Truth Initiative

2018; Jenssen 2019).

Beginning back in the 1930s and 1940s when marketing began to take off in general in

the U.S., cigarettes were advertised in a very positive light, similar to how JUULing is now being

marketed as in the Reference image. It wasn’t until the 1950s when big name tobacco companies

knew that cigarettes were causing cancer based on the landmark ‘Wynder and colleagues 1953

rat study’ (CDC 2014). Rather than telling consumers about the damaging health effects, the

executives of major tobacco companies met in December 1953, with an advertising firm’ Hill

and Knowlton’s that they enlisted to help created a strategy making their own industry-funded

research group called ‘Tobacco Industry Research Committee.’ They expanded this by hiring

researchers and academicians to be the public spokesmen to continue denying the harms of the

product, funding research that diverted attention from cigarettes, and marketing new projects that

had a “lower risk” i.e. cigarettes with filters which did nothing (CDC 2014). This is how the
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tobacco companies planted a seed of doubt, making people doubt the science, this has essentially

been the Tobacco playbook, a big smoke and mirrors game that diverts attention to truth of

matter, to keep ‘business as usual’ to keep these companies making billions at the cost of human

lives. It has been used time and time again for many different issues, to obfuscate facts about

many things including to refute climate change and now to refute the harms of E-cigarettes.

This is also not the first-time nicotine have been targeted at youth, since up to half of all

lifetime smokers die from tobacco related diseases, to see a profit in the future they have to

attract younger smokers to replace the smokers that die early (Tobacco free kids 2014). The idea

is to hook teens, then have them addicted for life, or a ‘returning customer’ in their eyes. There is

a lot evidence out there that ‘big tobacco’ companies do this, including the tobacco giant

company Phillip Morris, which goes back to 1969 targeting youth, specifically stating in a 1984

internal Philip Morris document that “products targeted to [the] younger end of spectrum [are]

most viable.” Further stating the reasons why teens start smoking 1) “...peer pressure, 2) to

rebel/assert independence, 3) to appear grown up [and] 4) to experiment,” (Tobacco free kids

2014). It did not stop there, when as recently as 2011, when Marlboro (which is a cigarette brand

under the Phillip Morris company) launched a ‘Be Marlboro’ campaign that advertised to youths

“featuring young, hip dreamers and doers partying, falling in love, adventure traveling and

generally being “cool.” This tactic was also used through the "Marlboro Man" cowboy

advertisements used from the late 1950s through the 1990s featuring a rough, macho cowboy,

because cigarettes with filters were deemed too feminine (Marlboro Man 2020). The 2011

campaign was so bad that in 2013 Germany’s courts banned the campaign since it “encouraged

children as young as 14” to smoke (Tobacco free kids 2014). If the description of the

advertisement above sounds familiar it is because Altria, the parent company to Phillip Morris
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USA who is the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, just bought a 35 % stake in JUUL (Roose 2019).

This then allows JUUL to rise to the top of the field, having 75% of the e-cigarette market in the

U.S. (Nedelman et al. 2018).

In the fifth-grade students my age were forced to participate in ‘D.A.R.E.’ or Drug Abuse

Resistance Education classes, where officer Tim, a local policeman, came to our class for months

to discuss the harms of alcohol, drugs and the thing that most resonated, was cigarettes. After

that my classmates and I were scared of getting yellow teeth and having to use a voice box due to

throat cancer and other ills associated with smoking. Fast forward to freshman year of college

when there was a new metal USB looking contraption that seemingly everyone was puffing out

of. This was marketed as a “safe” alternative to smoking.

Why did this happen? What was the motivating factor behind marketing to young

people? One plausible explanation is that the D.A.R.E. classes we sat through in 5th grade and

other regulations on cigarettes turned out to be very effective for my generation, and tobacco

sales plummeted. The tobacco companies needed a new way to target youth to make more

money. This included the marketing idea to have electronic cigarettes, but in a new, cool tech

wrapping paper and tie it with a bow, which apparently worked extremely well as now nearly

one out of five students between the ages of 12 and 17 years old have seen a JUUL used in

school in 2018 (Truth Initiative 2018).

For kids of my generation the majority do not believe that when “Juuling” they are

actually inhaling addictive nicotine; they just think it is water vapor with flavor. It is somewhat

understandable and a very successful marketing ploy, to have flavors such as mango, cool

cucumber and crème brulee, which do not sound even remotely harmful (Roose 2019). However,

it is also hard to imagine that kids of my generation really think their body is craving JUST water
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vapor, as nicotine is in fact behind the highly addictive nature of vaping. The reference picture

above, uses positive, upbeat and innocent images including bold rainbow colors, and stylish

adolescent looking models, with geometric triangles that almost look apart of a children’s game.

They also use the ploy of using a welcoming diverse cast of models, who all look athletic and hip

and people who even I would want to hang out with! (Jenssen 2019).

However, you would think the generation that learned about D.A.R.E. in the 5th

grade, the generation that is supposed to be the most informed and technologically savvy

generation yet, would not fall for the playbook that we were so clearly taught about in regard to

tobacco. But we did in fact fall for it, in part due to my generation’s other addiction to social

media and the obsession with influencers that have been a major factor leading to about 80% of

high schoolers and 50% of middle-schoolers' vaping (Nedelman et al. 2018). These influencers

that are promoting JUUL are actual adults, though who should know better than promoting an

addictive drug to children. There is still plenty of blame for the company JUUL specifically, as

they pay ‘influencers’ to promote their product on social media (i.e. Christina Zayas who was

paid $1,000 for a blog and Instagram post supporting the product) (Nedelman et al. 2018). It

does not help that adults of "Gen Z" are promoting this because JUUL, as Zayas stated, “liked

my edgy style and that I appealed to younger market.” She did this in 2017, with JUUL paying

10 other influences to promote JUULing as well, but it has created a life of its own. Even young

celebrities got on the bandwagon like professional actress, and comedian Awkwafina, using

social media to promote JUUL products (Nedelman et al. 2018).

The official Tweeter account of JUUL has 25% of their retweets being from kids under

18, and they used these social media sites, since unlike TV, social media has detailed information

on the “efficacy of their campaigns” (Nedelman et al. 2018). This allows “companies to better
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assess the return on investment” (just a reminder this ‘return on investment’ are kids getting

addicted to nicotine that we are talking about), or what the new coined term is ‘nico-teen.’ JUUL

really knew their audience. since the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids led a two-year

investigation that proved that JUUL paid influencers to post pictures that glamorized JUULing.

As part of this campaign, JUUL told the influencers how to take the photos, what hashtags to use

and when to post to get the most visibility, cultivating the perfect façade of what vaping is. This

was so successful that the campaign was subsequently expanded to more than 40 countries

(Nedelman et al. 2018).

Things are now somewhat improving since August 2018, when the FDA began to require

companies to have labeling on advertising and packaging on the e-cigarettes to say "This product

contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical." On November 2018 JUUL had halted most

of the retail sales of flavor products and restricted sales to adults 21 or older (Nedelman et al.

2018). So it appears that regulations, are finally, slowly, catching up.

But the damage is done, with vaping doubling in high schools and one in five seniors

saying they have vaped within the last month (Nedelman et al. 2018). What I really want to ask

my generation is “How could you be fooled by them?” We are smarter than engaging in the

infantile-like behavior of sucking on a USB-like device all day and pouring money out for

corporations like JUUL that don’t care about generating kids addicted to nicotine, so that they

can have a ‘return on investment.’ Don’t get me wrong, there should be WAY more FDA and

federal government regulations on e-cigarettes advertisements and explicitly saying what is in e-

cigarettes. This should rest squarely on the shoulders of these companies, especially JUUL, to

stop selling to kids, and to help this generation recover from this debilitating nicotine addiction.
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It is also time for my generation to take responsibility and to wake up, since we are the future

and “brightest” generation that has fallen for JUUL’s smoke and mirrors.

Works Cited

“6 Important Facts about JUUL.” Truth Initiative, 20 Aug. 2018, truthinitiative.org/research-

resources/emerging-tobacco-products/6-important-facts-about-juul.

Jenssen, Brian. “JUUL Ad Campaign ‘Targets Adult Smokers," But New Research Shows
Youth-Focused Past.” LDI, 17 May 2019, ldi.upenn.edu/healthpolicysense/juul-ad-
campaign-targets-adult-smokers-new-research-shows-youth-focused-past.

“Marlboro Man.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Nov. 2020,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlboro_Man.

“Maybe you’re the Target; New Global Campaign Found to Target Teens.” (2014, March).
Retrieved from
https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/global/pdfs/en/yourethetarget_report.pdf

National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (US) Office on Smoking
and Health. “Fifty Years of Change 1964–2014.” The Health Consequences of Smoking-50
Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General., U.S. National Library of Medicine,
2014, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK294310/.

Nedelman, Michael, et al. “#JUUL: How Social Media Hyped Nicotine for a New Generation.”
CNN, Cable News Network, 19 Dec. 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/12/17/health/juul-social-
media-influencers/index.html.

Roose, Kevin. “Juul's Convenient Smoke Screen.” The New York Times, The New York Times,
11 Jan. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/technology/juul-cigarettes-marketing.html.