Reducing Cigarette Smoking: An Opportunity for Social Marketing?

This article considers the range of approaches used to reduce cigarette smoking and notes their limited success. Technological solutions, economic incentives and disincentives, legislation, and public education have had an impact on cigarette use, but smoking remains a significant threat to health. A social marketing approach has the potential to combine and intensify these otherwise partial solutions. Through analysis of the exchange process encouraging or maintaining smoking, through segmentation of target markets to match strategies and appeals, and through coordinated interventions affecting the product, price availability, and promotion of cigarettes and smoking, a social market approach represents a means of moving beyond the present state of fragmentation and limited results.