Smoking Truth Campaign
The Florida TRUTH anti-smoking campaign built a new product and branded it. The product/action was being cool by attacking adults who want to manipulate teens to smoke. The campaign reduced the price of the behavior (attacking adults) by selecting adults everyone agreed had been manipulating them. They created places where kids were found by means of a statewide train caravan and the founding of local “Truth chapters.” And, of course, they used promotion – but promotion that went beyond the traditional media ads to having kids directly confront the tobacco industry and publicize this teen “terrorism” in the popular media. The Campaign routinely carried out surveys of its target audience that allowed the campaign to discover important micro-market segments (south Florida Hispanics) where impacts were lagging. The Truth campaign has been a dramatic success; it is now the model for the Legacy Foundation’s national anti-smoking campaign. In just two years, from 1998 to 2000, the percent of Florida middle schoolers who smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days fell from 18.5 to 8.6 percent while the percentage for high schoolers went from 27.4 to 20.9. These market share gains would be the envy of ANY private sector marketer.