How a Ladies' Cigarette Became the Most Masculine Brand in America

In the early 1950s, Philip Morris had a problem.

New science showed that smoking was dangerous, and cigarette makers scrambled to offer filtered products, which people mistakenly believed were safer.

But filters created a second problem, because everyone assumed they were for women. Philip Morris had, in fact, been marketing a filtered cigarette to women since 1924.

The brand was Marlboro, and it featured the slogan “Mild as May.”

The Leo Burnett agency was hired to reposition Marlboro and filtered cigarettes in general, and firm founder Burnett made an unusual call. He didn’t address the health concerns. He didn’t mention the brand’s history as a “ladies’ cigarette” at all.

Instead, he amplified an identity so overwhelmingly masculine that the history and the health data both became irrelevant.

Enter the Marlboro Man… sea captains, weightlifters, war correspondents, construction workers, and eventually, that classic cowboy.

Within a year, Marlboro’s market share went from less than 1% to the fourth best-selling brand in the country. As they continued to gain traction, Philip Morris dropped every other manly archetype and let the cowboy ride alone for the next 45 years.

Nobody was buying Marlboro for the filtered cigarettes. They were buying a rugged, all-American-man identity. The cigarette was just how that identity was broadcast.

In 1965, Mick Jagger referenced this phenomenon with a single line in (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction:

He can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.

Jagger was almost certainly singing about Marlboro. The sarcasm works because the campaign had already succeeded so completely. Over the course of a decade, a brand of cigarettes had become shorthand for masculinity itself.

By 1972, Marlboro had ascended to the top of the tobacco industry. Not with features, benefits, or health claims. Identity.

People Like Us Buy Things Like This

Savvy marketers have tied products and services to personal identity for at least a century, because it works. In our consumerist culture, we are what we buy, and we buy what we are.

The internet has accelerated identity as the fundamental criteria for both how we present ourselves and how we choose. Decisions get made daily based on whether “people like us” do this thing or that, and that applies to every purchase — consumer or B2B — at every price point.

In the mass-market “Mad Men” days, “people like us” got drawn as broadly as possible. Marlboro’s ideal customer profile wasn’t even limited to “men who smoked,” because they were intentionally attracting new smokers on a regular basis, often at a young, impressionable age.

Now days, segments are more narrow than ever, and companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to match the right identity to the right product. For example, Michelob Ultra invested heavily in becoming the choice for an “I run marathons and also want a beer” identity.

As solopreneurs, we obviously don’t have that kind of budget. But the smarter marketing approach gives you something more powerful than Philip Morris ever had.

You get your prospects to strongly identify with you as a person, before you ever make an offer to buy. In an age of technological alienation, that human connection is more valuable than it’s ever been.

Shared values, worldview, and identity give you an “unfair advantage” before you’ve even made a pitch. You become the only logical choice by making the right emotional connection.

Some small businesses succeed on this foundation alone, especially in client services. But you can go deeper by understanding identity at a structural level in your copy, your offers, and even your product/service design.

The Two Identity Roles You Must Understand

The “Leading” Expert has to unequivocally define who’s in the group and who’s not, right from the start. You do that by demonstrating your core values and stating a point of view that’s congruent with the prospect’s problem.

When it comes to the persuasive elements of your offer, you’ll want to amplify the desired identification and effectively transfer their shared identity with you onto your product or service. You do this by aligning your offer with the desired role the product or service helps the prospect play.

In other words, you help the prospect define themselves within their worldview. Your copy has to reflect the qualities they already see in themselves, or the ones they’re reaching for.

How do you do that? The first step is to understand two crucial identity roles.

1. Aspiration

With aspirational roles, the prospect wants to reach their ideal self or reinforce how they already see themselves in the context of the problem you solve. It’s the social status that comes from how people perceive them going forward, not the feature list.

These roles show up as self-designations: “intellectual,” “fashionable,” “pragmatic,” “progressive,” “accomplished,” “tech-savvy.” You hand these qualities back to the prospect to confirm that the purchase reinforces them or gets them there.

Take someone buying a Spanish course six months before a planned trip with friends to Medellín, Colombia. The features of the course involve the mechanics of quickly obtaining a certain proficiency in another language.

The benefits include being able to communicate with non-English-speaking people in over 20 countries where Spanish is the primary language, plus general benefits such as enhanced cognitive abilities, increased neuroplasticity in the brain, and a boost in memory and creativity.

But take it further and look more closely at the primary motivators: the surprise and admiration from co-travelers, the de facto group leadership that comes from being the one who can actually speak to people, the status of being “the multilingual one.”

Marlboro sold aspiration, too. Nobody buying their first pack in 1955 was already a cowboy. They were buying the chance to feel like one.

2. Achievement

Achievement roles aim to celebrate and reinforce a status that the prospect has already reached. Luxury items immediately come to mind, but there’s a much broader realm of achievement identities to account for.

Identity roles here include “successful business owner,” “college graduate,” “homeowner,” “attorney,” “executive,” “civic leader,” “patron of the arts,” or “philanthropist.” With achievement roles, you first establish the accomplishment as an exclusive baseline that allows them to enhance their status with your product or service.

The signal goes beyond “I can afford this,” and ascends to “I belong to this group.”

While aspirational identity is offered to the many, achievement identity is inherently defined by exclusivity. And it’s that natural gatekeeping that motivates the right prospects to raise their hand and claim their membership in the next level of the “club.”