How a Ladies' Cigarette Became the Most Masculine Brand in America
"He can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me."
In the early 1950s, Philip Morris had a problem.
New science showed that smoking was dangerous, and cigarette makers scrambled to offer filtered products, which people mistakenly believed were safer.
But filters created a second problem, because everyone assumed they were for women. Philip Morris had, in fact, been marketing a filtered cigarette to women since 1924.
The brand was Marlboro, and it featured the slogan “Mild as May.”
The Leo Burnett agency was hired to reposition Marlboro and filtered cigarettes in general, and firm founder Burnett made an unusual call. He didn’t address the health concerns. He didn’t mention the brand’s history as a “ladies’ cigarette” at all.
Instead, he amplified an identity so overwhelmingly masculine that the history and the health data both became irrelevant.
Enter the Marlboro Man… sea captains, weightlifters, war correspondents, construction workers, and eventually, that classic cowboy.
Within a year, Marlboro’s market share went from less than 1% to the fourth best-selling brand in the country. As they continued to gain traction, Philip Morris dropped every other manly archetype and let the cowboy ride alone for the next 45 years.
Nobody was buying Marlboro for the filtered cigarettes. They were buying a rugged, all-American-man identity. The cigarette was just how that identity was broadcast.
In 1965, Mick Jagger referenced this phenomenon with a single line in (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction:
He can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.
Jagger was almost certainly singing about Marlboro. The sarcasm works because the campaign had already succeeded so completely. Over the course of a decade, a brand of cigarettes had become shorthand for masculinity itself.
By 1972, Marlboro had ascended to the top of the tobacco industry. Not with features, benefits, or health claims. Identity.
People Like Us Buy Things Like This
Savvy marketers have tied products and services to personal identity for at least a century, because it works. In our consumerist culture, we are what we buy, and we buy what we are.
The internet has accelerated identity as the fundamental criteria for both how we present ourselves and how we choose. Decisions get made daily based on whether “people like us” do this thing or that, and that applies to every purchase — consumer or B2B — at every price point.
In the mass-market “Mad Men” days, “people like us” got drawn as broadly as possible. Marlboro’s ideal customer profile wasn’t even limited to “men who smoked,” because they were intentionally attracting new smokers on a regular basis, often at a young, impressionable age.
Now days, segments are more narrow than ever, and companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to match the right identity to the right product. For example, Michelob Ultra invested heavily in becoming the choice for an “I run marathons and also want a beer” identity.
As solopreneurs, we obviously don’t have that kind of budget. But the smarter marketing approach gives you something more powerful than Philip Morris ever had.
You get your prospects to strongly identify with you as a person, before you ever make an offer to buy. In an age of technological alienation, that human connection is more valuable than it’s ever been.
Shared values, worldview, and identity give you an “unfair advantage” before you’ve even made a pitch. You become the only logical choice by making the right emotional connection.
Some small businesses succeed on this foundation alone, especially in client services. But you can go deeper by understanding identity at a structural level in your copy, your offers, and even your product/service design.
The Two Identity Roles You Must Understand
The “Leading” Expert has to unequivocally define who’s in the group and who’s not, right from the start. You do that by demonstrating your core values and stating a point of view that’s congruent with the prospect’s problem.
When it comes to the persuasive elements of your offer, you’ll want to amplify the desired identification and effectively transfer their shared identity with you onto your product or service. You do this by aligning your offer with the desired role the product or service helps the prospect play.
In other words, you help the prospect define themselves within their worldview. Your copy has to reflect the qualities they already see in themselves, or the ones they’re reaching for.
How do you do that? The first step is to understand two crucial identity roles.
1. Aspiration
With aspirational roles, the prospect wants to reach their ideal self or reinforce how they already see themselves in the context of the problem you solve. It’s the social status that comes from how people perceive them going forward, not the feature list.
These roles show up as self-designations: “intellectual,” “fashionable,” “pragmatic,” “progressive,” “accomplished,” “tech-savvy.” You hand these qualities back to the prospect to confirm that the purchase reinforces them or gets them there.
Take someone buying a Spanish course six months before a planned trip with friends to Medellín, Colombia. The features of the course involve the mechanics of quickly obtaining a certain proficiency in another language.
The benefits include being able to communicate with non-English-speaking people in over 20 countries where Spanish is the primary language, plus general benefits such as enhanced cognitive abilities, increased neuroplasticity in the brain, and a boost in memory and creativity.
But take it further and look more closely at the primary motivators: the surprise and admiration from co-travelers, the de facto group leadership that comes from being the one who can actually speak to people, the status of being “the multilingual one.”
Marlboro sold aspiration, too. Nobody buying their first pack in 1955 was already a cowboy. They were buying the chance to feel like one.
2. Achievement
Achievement roles aim to celebrate and reinforce a status that the prospect has already reached. Luxury items immediately come to mind, but there’s a much broader realm of achievement identities to account for.
Identity roles here include “successful business owner,” “college graduate,” “homeowner,” “attorney,” “executive,” “civic leader,” “patron of the arts,” or “philanthropist.” With achievement roles, you first establish the accomplishment as an exclusive baseline that allows them to enhance their status with your product or service.
The signal goes beyond “I can afford this,” and ascends to “I belong to this group.”
While aspirational identity is offered to the many, achievement identity is inherently defined by exclusivity. And it’s that natural gatekeeping that motivates the right prospects to raise their hand and claim their membership in the next level of the “club.”
Start With What They Already Believe
The Marlboro Man worked because Leo Burnett didn’t try to change anyone’s mind.
You’re never trying to change or ignore what your prospect believes, even when their belief works against you. A negative belief is an objection, and every copywriter knows objections get addressed, not buried.
Philip Morris had one belief working in their favor. Men generally already believed that smoking was manly.
The attitude wasn’t created when the campaign began, because that’s a much more difficult task. Instead, it was recognized, and the entire campaign was designed to reinforce and amplify that attitude instead of arguing against the health data or the brand’s actual history.
Start with what people already believe. Then amplify the part of that belief that already works for you.
It’s Easier Than You Think
Using the Marlboro Man as an example may seem unfair, given that it’s one of the most iconic archetypes in advertising history. But it’s really pretty straightforward when you see the process.
It’s even easier when you’re highly in tune with your audience and exist within the same worldview as they do. Between 2007 and 2017, I created at least one new product every year, and they all succeeded without a single misfire. While I won’t say it didn’t take work, the answers were always right there in front of me thanks to my congruence with the audience.
People want to solve their problems. They want to buy from people they trust. And they want to become who they want to be or reinforce who they are with their purchases.
Marlboro didn’t sell cigarettes. It sold the image of a cowboy, and let smokers do the rest… buying into that identity every time they lit up.
What are you really selling?
Keep going-
P.S. People trust and follow those they perceive as fundamentally similar to themselves. Not people they admire from a distance, but people who are “us.”
A “leading” expert is not the person with the best credentials or the foremost academic authority. You become a leading expert by being the person people want to follow.
Leading Expert Launchpad teaches you how to craft content and messages that do more than demonstrate your expertise. They connect with your intended audience in a highly profitable human way.
further: flashback
🎶 Blondie – Heart Of Glass, Parallel Lines, 1978 🎶
Blondie was part of New York’s punk and new wave scenes, subcultures that loathed disco. And yet, in 1978 Blondie did disco on their own terms with Heart of Glass and not only got away with it — they broke big and kept going. (YouTube)
further: sharing
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