The need for new anti‐smoking advertising strategies that do not provoke smoker defiance

Abstract

The misguided effort to change the smoking behavior of college students using the same anti‐smoking messages created for young teens apparently stems from the misplaced marketing belief that ads designed to prevent young teens from smoking can also effectively encourage college‐student smokers to quit. When college students were asked to respond to current anti‐smoking messages, non‐smokers championed the anti‐smoking cause while smokers responded with defiance, denial, and other counter‐productive behaviors. These studies show that persuading legal‐age young adults to quit would require new message strategies which show greater respect for the individual, greater support for the effort in quitting, and ways to counter faulty logic.