MARKETING TO WOMEN

I was surprised to hear that the first real women’s brand was Virginia Slims, a cigarette brand. The brand was launched in 1968 and marketed to young professional women. With the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby”, the campaign connected well with women’s emancipation and feminism in the seventies. Especially because the campaign resonated so strongly with the values of young women, critics considered it to be responsible for a rapid increase in smoking among teenage girls. A report by the Surgeon General of the United States describes this marketing strategy as attempting to link smoking “to women’s freedom, emancipation, and empowerment.”

In later years, it was exactly the strength of the ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’ campaigns connection to the feminist movement that led to an identity crisis for the brand.  In the early 1990’s, young women did not want to be associated with feminism anymore. For them, the slogan was the reason not to buy Virginia Slims anymore. The brand was reinvented and adopted the tagline: ‘It’s a woman thing’. However, it never equalled it’s success during the seventies.

Apparently, women have always been an important part of the cigarette market since Lucky Strike’s ‘‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’’ campaign in the 1920’s. Virginia Slims was the first cigarette exclusively for women that was successful. Women are an important target group for the tobacco industry;  the cost of marketing to women in the USA alone is more than $5 billion per year.