Abstract

""Like a Cigarette Should": RJ Reynolds' Pivot from Camel to Winston during the Emerging Health Scare, 1950-1964"

Martha Gardner, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (martha.gardner@mcphs.edu)

When researchers began to connect cigarette smoking to lung cancer in the late 1940s/early 1950s, very few cigarette brands had filters. Ten years later, more than half of cigarettes sold did. While the tobacco companies did not publicly agree that cigarettes were harmful, they feared that the research would harm their business. RJ Reynolds introduced the Winston brand in 1954 and it became the #1 overall brand within 10 years. EA Darr, head of the company, spearheaded the idea of marketing a filter, but many others in the company disagreed, showing the difficulty companies had with confronting the emerging health scare. Ultimately, the tobacco used in the filter brand was much stronger than that used in their unfiltered Camel brand, meaning that the Winston consumer actually inhaled more nicotine and tar per cigarette than the Camel smoker. The filter, therefore, provided an “illusion” of safety, but did not in fact reduce the risk. Ultimately, the “taste” was preserved, but consumers’ health was not.
While their marketing highlighted the cigarette's "effective" filter, the emphasis in their ads was on taste, rather than health: Winstons Taste Good, Like a Cigarette Should" soon became a well-known slogan with an inescapably-memorable slogan. The strategies used by RJ Reynolds created an immediate success for the company. The rise and fall of the brand, eclipsed by Philip Morris Tobacco Company's Marlboro brand by the early 1970s, provide a telling window into tobacco executives beliefs, strategies and practices as the harms of the cigarette became known and accepted.