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Albena Arnaudova on the ruthless
search for new smokers.
‘I choose where to go’ is the last thing a Bulgarian teenager can claim. In
the painful period of transition from a state-planned to a free-market economy, the
quality of life for most Bulgarians has so deteriorated that 70 per cent of the population
exists on or under the poverty line. Yet this past summer thousands of young Bulgarians
were hooked by Lucky Strike’s ‘I Choose Where To Go’ web site and a
competition whose final winners were promised trips to London and Tibet. A huge number of
hits and a record number of registrations made this campaign an immense advertising
success story. It also tells us volumes about the tobacco industry’s approach to the
lucrative markets in Eastern Europe.
At the beginning of the 1990s democracy was perceived as a quick jump into a dream
society – a land where everyone could have as much as they wanted. But today
Bulgarians are as far away from this Western-consumer dreamland as ever. Yet an answer is
popping out of magazines, newspapers, billboards, TV and radio, and it’s a simple
one: while it is true you cannot travel freely Westwards, you can go to the land of
Marlboro. It is a ready substitute for all those places you want to visit, but can’t.
The
Western cigarette is one of the few easily accessible Western
consumer goodies for Eastern Europeans. Who says it’s tobacco?
No, it’s ‘freedom of choice’ we’re talking
about. By smoking a Western cigarette you’re clutching at
a tiny piece of that dreamed-of Western lifestyle. And young Bulgarians,
sensitive about their choices and freedoms, make the ideal target
group. They are excellent consumer ‘raw material’ to
be turned into the expanding market of future lifelong smokers
from Central and Eastern Europe. The global tobacco industry badly
needs these new converts to make up for the regulatory pressure
and stagnant or declining rates of smoking in the West. The young
people who today voluntarily provide their own consumer profiles
when they register on the Lucky Strike web site will probably
not be able to quit smoking, even when they learn that freedom
is something other than a visit to the fantastic teenage music
clubs of Sofia where Pall Mall pays for their drinks and the band.
This
is a new development of an old drama for Bulgaria. Our rates of
smoking, at 56 per cent for men and 32 per cent for women, are
some of Europe’s highest. Some six per cent of smokers are
under 12 and 28 per cent are 13 to 15 year-olds. With some 1.5
million dollars in ‘advertising spend’ tobacco companies
are the second-largest advertisers in the country. And despite
a bunch of pompous documents called the ‘National Anti-smoking
Programme’ actual government anti-smoking health promotion
is minimal – only three anti-smoking clinics handle just
four hundred clients a year. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the
Bulgarian State depends on the jobs, investment and taxes from
a booming tobacco industry to help cover the wrenching costs of
transition to a market economy.
The Eastward expansion of the big players in global tobacco – replacing the old
public industries – is all too clear. Phillip Morris now controls 80 per cent of the
Czech and 50 per cent of the Slovakian cigarette markets. They recently purchased a
factory near St Petersburg and plan to produce 25 billion cigarettes a year there. British
American Tobacco now operates factories in Hungary, the Ukraine, Russia and Poland. This
October at World Health Organization hearings on tobacco in Geneva the boss of a leading
Russian advertising agency made the astonishing claim that putting minimal health warnings
on cigarette packs and banning sales close to schools was all the Government should do, as
anything else would mean an unwarranted restriction on the operation of the free market.
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New
Internationalist 331
