Industry tactics

Governments need to be far more sophisticated in the way that they monitor cigarette prices. Using weighted average prices will help but it is also essential to monitor price trends by price segment.

Dr Robert Branston, from the Centre for Governance and Regulation at the University of Bath’s School of Management; and Professor Anna Gilmore, from the University’s Department for Health and the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, say that capping the pre-tax cigarette manufacturers’ prices would safeguard society from the market failure behind manufacturers’ pricing power and associated high profits.

It’s now widely accepted that tobacco companies use corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives to influence policymakers and weaken public health policies. Until now what tobacco industry executives think about this and what it tells us about the limits of tobacco companies’ CSR programmes has been a mystery. For the first time researchers at the University of Bath have been able to explore this question using internal British American Tobacco (BAT) documents.

On the 1st December 2012, plain packaging will be introduced in Australia. Cigarettes will be required to be sold in olive green packaging with large pictorial health warnings and brand names appearing in standardised font. Ahead of the legislation, Imperial Tobacco has changed the packaging of their Peter Stuyvesant brand to show a ripped branded pack exposing plain packaging underneath with the accompanying slogan “it’s what on the inside that counts”.

Plain packaging for cigarettes would require cigarettes to be sold in packets of a standard colour and shape with brand names written in a standardised font and pictorial health warnings covering a substantial proportion of the packet. The public consultation on plain packaging in the UK came to a close on the 10th August 2012. A few days later the Tobacco Manufacturer’s Association (TMA) publicised that ‘half a million oppose plain packaging .’ There are three significant issues with this figure:

There are many case studies documenting how the tobacco industry attempts to influence tobacco tax policies but until now there has been no attempt to collate this information. Together with a colleague at the University of Edinburgh, we have published a systematic review of 36 studies (largely in the US) investigating tobacco industry efforts to influence tax policies between 1985 and 2010.