Few advertising campaigns have been as effective, or as harmful, as the Marlboro Man. It is studied for how completely it changed a product’s image, and remembered for what that product did to the people who bought it, including the men who posed for it.
A women’s cigarette
Philip Morris introduced Marlboro in 1924 as a cigarette for women. For decades that was its identity.
In the early 1950s, as scientific evidence about the harms of smoking began to emerge, the tobacco industry promoted filtered cigarettes as a response. Filters were marketed with technical, scientific-sounding claims meant to ease smokers’ fears. But filtered cigarettes, and Marlboro in particular, had a problem with men: they were seen as feminine. In market research, men said they might consider switching to a filtered cigarette, but they worried about being seen smoking one marketed to women.
Leo Burnett’s answer
Philip Morris gave the job of repositioning Marlboro to Chicago advertising executive Leo Burnett, who conceived the Marlboro Man in 1954. Early ads showed rugged men in a range of tough roles. Over time, one image won out: the cowboy, alone or with others, in wide-open Western landscapes. That grew into “Marlboro Country,” a world of horses, mountains and big skies in which the cigarette was simply part of the scenery.
The ads avoided talking about filters or health at all. They sold an identity, independence and toughness, that made a filtered cigarette feel masculine.
The results
Commercially, it worked on a scale few campaigns ever have. According to the BBC, Marlboro sales increased 300% in the two years after the ads debuted in 1955, and the brand went on to become one of the best-selling cigarettes in the world. Cultural critic James Twitchell told the BBC that the genius of the ad was that, just as people were realizing smoking could kill them, the cigarette was identified with a character who seemed indomitable.
The campaign ran in the United States from 1954 to 1999.
The cost
The men who played the Marlboro Man were real, and several of them died of the diseases linked to the product they advertised. Wayne McLaren, David McLean, Dick Hammer, Eric Lawson and Jerome Edward Jackson, all of whom appeared in Marlboro-related ads, died of smoking-related illnesses, which earned Marlboro Reds the nickname “cowboy killers.”
McLaren became an anti-smoking campaigner and testified in favor of anti-smoking legislation. Lawson, a smoker since age 14, later appeared in an anti-smoking commercial parodying the Marlboro Man. He died in January 2014 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “He knew the cigarettes had a hold on him,” his wife told reporters. “He knew, yet he still couldn’t stop.”
Why this is “mixed”
As a piece of brand strategy, the Marlboro Man is one of the most successful repositionings in history: a product was transformed in the public mind without changing anything about it except its story. That is exactly what makes it a warning. The same techniques that sell soft drinks and sneakers were used to sell a product that kills many of its users, and the campaign’s success is measured in both sales and lives.