Tobacco Documents Online

This document from the R.J. Reynolds site, Status and Campaign Plan for Tobacco Tax Initiative, is a detailed description of the tobacco industry's game-plan to scuttle citizen-led ballot initiatives. We see here that the tobacco industry and the firms it hires to defeat initiatives go far beyond simply lobbying for their own side. They work behind the scenes to undermine support already won for the initiative by the proponents. They threaten groups that support the initiative financially (for example, here they threatened the California Medical Association by telling them they would push 'anti-medicine' legislation if they backed the initiative), they intimidate legislators by letting them know that getting behind the initiative could damage their future political future. They tie up professional signature-gathering firms with other business to keep the proponents from retaining their services. They employ lawyers to seek out ways to legally harass nonprofit organizations, threaten their charitable status, and make them expend their resources on work that is unrelated to their missions, and more.

This document gives tremendous insight into how the tobacco industry and its operatives interfere with the democratic system.

This report, prepared in 1994 for Philip Morris by a company called Marketing Perceptions, Inc. relates the results of focus group testing done to evaluate two names proposed for a new brand of cigarette targeted at young men: "Barking Dog" and "Barking Fish" brand cigarettes.

The name "Barking Dog" was meant to convey images of loyalty, "tried and true," "never bites" and "man's best friend."

It backfired completely. Instead, the document says in each focus group,

"Most of the men rejected the positioning. They weren't certain if, these days they could think of their cigarettes as 'my best friend.'... Some also suggested that there could be a 'negative spin' in interpreting the positioning, 'being dependent on your DOG'...In each group, men noted that a Barking Dog is angry, vicious, noisy, annoying or an intrusion."

As for "Barking Fish" cigarettes, as might be expected, "...Most found the images unsettling."

"There was general agreement that the pack with the fish graphic was 'the worst," immediately bringing to mind smelly, fishy, wet-tasting cigarettes."

Well, duh.

Kudos to the young men who recognized that cigarettes are far from "man's best friend," and to those who refused to swallow the "Barking Fish" hook.