Smokers ignore health warnings

No one would drink a glass of poison if it was emblazoned with large letters warning that it would kill them. But millions of people every day ignore similar warnings on cigarette packets. Do seasoned smokers ignore the stark health warnings that declare "smoking kills", "smoking seriously harms you and others around you" and "smokers die younger", or are their eyes trained not to see them?

That's what academics at the UK Centre for Tobacco Studies – based at Bath and Bristol universities – decided to investigate using eye-tracking technology. Their aim was to find out whether the government's introduction of health labels – which began in the 1970s with the message, "Warning by HM Government. Smoking can damage your health" – was effective at preventing the habit or encouraging addicts to stop.

What they discovered won't please the tobacco giants. The academics' findings suggest that the best way to stop non-smokers from picking up the habit is to force cigarette-makers to box up their fags in plain packets devoid of any branding whatsoever. The work was carried out by Marcus Munafò, professor of biological psychology at Bristol University, and Linda Bauld, professor of socio-management at the University of Stirling, who noticed that tobacco firms had enjoyed significant surges in sales after jazzing up their packet designs.

The academics point out that, as governments around the world bought in increasingly strict restrictions on cigarette adverts on billboards, TV, cinema and more, tobacco firms began spending more time and money investigating new ways to attract customers. And, slowly but surely, their cigarette packaging became increasingly imaginative.

Munafò points to an example of when Sterling introduced price-marked packs to emphasise their value in 2008. "Its market share increased from 5% to 6.1% in four months," he says, before going on to flag up a limited edition "Celebration" pack of Lambert & Butler in 2004, which included pictures marking the brand's 25th anniversary. That, say the academics, helped to increase Lambert & Butler's market share by 0.4% – or some £60m – during four months on sale. Munafò points out that a couple of years later, Benson & Hedges Silver introduced a new "slide pack", which opened via a side panel rather than flip-top, and saw sales rocket 25% over six months, then a further 32.5% (or more than £74m) after a year. "In the latter two cases, spokespeople for the producers, Imperial Tobacco and Gallaher, explicitly attributed sales success to the packs," Munafò adds. "And an industry paper, Tobacco Journal International, pointed out that 'tobacco packaging is no longer the silent salesman it once was – it now shouts.' The tobacco industry clearly acknowledges that the pack is a marketing tool."

So Munafò and Bauld called in 43 non-smokers, light smokers and daily smokers to look at both plain and branded cigarette packets to help them to work out the different effects. All of their research packs featured health warnings, but while the branded packets were samples from 10 of the UK's most popular cigarette-makers, the others were simple, unadorned white packets, with their brand name and number of cigarettes displayed only nominally in a standard font. The academics then fitted their volunteers with eye-tracking technology to see how they responded to the packets.