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I think I'm missing something, could someone clarify?

I think trying to persuade anyone to start smoking is evil.

But society is generally accepting of marketing that's tailored to different demographics, including race.

So what's especially noteworthy about marketing cigarettes differently to black people vs. others?

AFAIK, regardless of race, the tobacco companies wanted to maximize their profits at the cost of their customers' lives.

Probably, the key is this (in the article):

"Despite the advertising consultants’ success, as evidenced by increased product sales, many critics became concerned that their efforts would target white children, and so instead the tobacco companies turned their attention to Black consumers."

Wikipedia:

"Despite it being illegal at the time, tobacco marketers gave out free menthol cigarette samples to children in black neighborhoods in the U.S."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menthol_cigarette

Rearranged facts/claims from another website, the American Lung Association's:

* When inhaled, menthol can reduce airway pain and irritation from cigarette smoke and suppress coughing, giving smokers the illusion of breathing more easily.

* Tobacco companies have relied on the soothing and cooling effects of menthol to make cigarettes more appealing to new smokers, youth, Black Americans and LGBTQ Americans among others.

* Menthol cigarettes have also been found to increase both the likelihood of becoming addicted and also the degree of addiction.

* Flavors, including menthol, are one of the primary reasons kids start using tobacco products.

* More than 8 in 10 of Black Americans who smoke use menthol cigarettes.

* About half of youth smokers ages 12-17 smoke menthols. That percentage is higher than the about 40% of adults 18 and older who prefer menthols.

https://www.lung.org/quit-smoking/smoking-facts/health-effec...

Also, this fits the repeated pattern of:

Hey, your business is doing something detrimental to people. People have political power, so stop it.

What if we just do it to people that don't have political power.

Carry on.

You see this with large corporations being slowly forced to change their ways in their home countries while continuing the same practices in developing nations. Or locally, where businesses that affect air pollution are allowed in some populated areas but not others where those with political sway live.

Some people, when being told "don't sell your death sticks to children" would perhaps reconsider the whole selling death sticks thing. Others will find and exploit every weakness in the system to continue making money from it.

https://borgenproject.org/top-6-facts-about-smoking-in-devel...

Of particular note, is the tactic where if a government tried to restrict harmful products, you buy politicians and undermine the whole democratic process. Reference the decades of wasted money and lives that the "Merchants of Doubt" have caused, likely the greatest and most effective attack ever on human civilization.

Thanks! That's exactly what I was missing. Thanks also for the extended explanation.
Good point. This is the sort of thing that should make us all go a bit deeper on this:

Perhaps it is marketing that is fundamentally evil.

Why should we be accepting of an entire industry dedicated solely to trying to convince people to buy things they literally do not need?

Someone in marketing would tell you that they aren't trying to convince people to buy things they don't need (that's an expensive way to pay for customers to abandon your product, generally) but that they are helping people understand that the problem they've had for a long time is solved by a product.
Unfortunately step one of that process is often convincing people that they have a problem, sometimes through questionable methods. It's easy to make a teenaged girl feel like her appearance is a problem when the basis for comparison is a photoshopped Instagram model, for example. Inducing demand for a product like that does not seem very beneficial for society.
Cigarettes harm people. Is that the case for most products? Certainly not to the same degree, but I wonder to what degree buying different types of products helps vs harms people. What we truly need to live is very little. What we want tends to be much more.

Jesus said that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. To what degree is our materialistic society harming us?

People do needs things. And people do want choice and information.

Marketing is no more evil than programming or any role. All roles have people use it detrimentally and unethically.

I'm a marketer and only once felt less ethical in my role (pushing credit cards for a bank group) but most of the time is good work, promoting decent products to people as an alternate to the popular choice, which in itself drives competition and product improvement. While I would personally love to see better ad regulation in the world to do thinks like reduce billboards and tracking etc I still think it clear the world would be a worse place if companies were not allowed to promote their product.

I agree that companies must have the legal right to provide potential customers with information about their products.

But essentially every advertisement I’ve ever seen is so far removed from “providing information” that characterizing them as such is a joke.

What they provide is a made up story of how good your life will be with this product (it bad it will be without it). That isn’t providing information, it’s manipulating people.

> But essentially every advertisement I’ve ever seen is so far removed from “providing information” that characterizing them as such is a joke.

I would say this is more what you notice. A huge amount of advertising is about brand awareness. Logos on sports teams etc Awareness is often not telling people anything, only trying to become part of someone's consideration set when they price compare 3 car insurances type thing. Or much of the comparison sites are paid ads essentially but they do it in a way that provides good information. Or if you watch Marques Brownlee type youtubers, a bunch of what they do is an ad but their brand is to give honest opinions while paid. Or how many ads simply show a product and a price type display?

Absolutely some ads are manipulating, but I suspect if you consciously look around you'll see many if not most are not manipulating, and your conscious brain seems to remember the ones you dislike hence to view it is the vast majority.

Anyway feel free to hate marketing :) I would really like to see less outdoor ads and better regulation in general but at the risk of being a bit specific to your wording I felt I needed to show another side to that view.

You're putting up a bit of a strawman, early. I didn't say it "should be banned," at least not yet. It is possible for something to be evil -- or let's put it lighter -- a net negative, and still one could see that trying to ban it is a bad thing.

Let's try it this way:

Does "marketing," as a paid business practice, cause more harm than good?

(NGL, when someone argues that their thing isn't evil by arguing e.g. "any practice can be good or evil" and not a direct and clear explanation of why their thing is good, big red flags.)

> Does "marketing," as a paid business practice, cause more harm than good?

I would have criticised it more as a false dilemma than strawman :) But I did that because I think it shows exactly your question. Imagine a world where there was zero marketing. I suspect you'd see far more entrenched companies e.g. as how does the new start-up get the word out fast enough to not flame out while they hope the market realises they exist. Far less competition as companies cant promote their prices leading to the entrenched companies charging higher margins and all that entails. It democratised many services like watching videos or email as this is ad funded so all people can utilise these services rather than the people that can afford.... though I guess you could position this is a bad thing due to the rise of social media.

There's a few... how much better do you think the world would be without marketing?

Marketing does cause numerous harms, but there is a great argument to be made that marketing to children specifically is inherently unethical.
Watching characters smoking on film often gives me cravings, but just seeing the words "menthol cigarettes" makes me want to run out and grab a pack. Thankfully, they're banned in Canada so it would be a long drive for me today. I'm not black, but most of the kids in my neighborhood were, and these ads certainly impacted us.

The article doesn't really dig into what's so bad about menthol. It makes the smoke feel cool, which provides sensory relief. But it's like drinking alcohol to feel warm -- it increases an individual's mental tolerance without doing a damned thing physically. It even seems to make the cigarettes more addictive, which strongly resonates with me, probably because they diminish the body's "stop that, it hurts" response. Clove cigarettes have a similarly numbing sensation (and delicious flavor). As a teen I couldn't understand why those were banned in some places... now I only wonder why menthols didn't get the axe when other flavors were banned in the US, though I've always harbored a suspicion about the brand of Obama's guilty pleasure.

I have the opposite feelings about menthols; I can't stand them. Whenever I smoke a menthol I feel like I'm smoking a toothbrush.

I'm a full time smoker, but I'll turn down a menthol if offered one. I'd rather suffer through nicotine cravings than subject myself to a Colgate coffin nail.

Reminded me of this slightly different take on culture/race specific marketing, and yes cigarettes are currently seen as 'worse' than alcohol now but in the 1920s the view would have been reversed.

"Cognac 101: The Beloved Brandy of Black Culture". https://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/cognac-brandy-of-black-cultur...

> The story of cognac’s penetration into our culture is unique and it continues to serve as a benchmark for brands to learn how to engage with us authentically and with intention.

Century-old French cognac brands are absolutely thrilled that African-American gentlemen and rap artists have decided to take a liking to their product.
Well, as the article clearly states, Hennessy, the largest and one of the oldest manufacturers, put considerable marketing effort into that, so, yes, they're probably fairly satisfied with it. I'm not sure what your point is, here.
By this logic, preferential marketing of home mortgages or diamonds to light skinned people is a form of racism, given that quite often a fool and his money are soon parted. Menthol cigarettes should not be banned or entirely excluded from advertisements. They should certainly be discouraged, especially among young people. At the same time, adults of any race should not be infantilized as not deserving of making their own decisions.
> preferential marketing of home mortgages or diamonds to light skinned people is a form of racism

Yes, addictive cancer sticks must be exactly the same thing as selling people houses.

"By this logic, not offering black & brown people mortgages and excluding them from status symbols is a form of racism..."

Yeah that seems pretty racist actually.

This is about the history of marketing menthols to Black people, which included the now-illegal practice of giving free cigarettes to children.
I loved menthol cigarettes but in every social group I've found, menthol cigarettes have a way higher amount of disparagement than cigarettes (which people occasionally admit to smoking while drunk). I wonder why people treat them like coffee connoisseurs treat shitty coffee.
In my experience, people's feelings towards menthols has been strongly correlated to caste -- rich white people seem to hate them with a passion. This might have something to do with who they were marketed to.
Same, well, until they were banned here anyway.

After they were banned there was no disparagement, only "where did you get those?".

The story is perhaps more nuanced than white people hurting black people.

Efforts to target community leaders were lead by a famous black marketing executive: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/903894678. And Tom Burrell has blood on his hands.

Related very interestin video by Knowing Better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMOyNgLSX2g
Similar Marlboro trying to market cigarettes to women so that they could be equal to men.
Corporate america markets just about everything based on race and the people wonder why there are racial divisions. You can say similar things about fast food or payday loans.

My opinion is the blame is misplaced, actually there shouldn't be any blaming. A smoker is not a victim. An adult willingly started a harmful addictive habit. The state has no authority to regulate this. It may save lives to ban harmful substances but a government does not exist to save lives. When you buy a cigarette you are well warned of the dangers right there in the box, it is not the government's place to prevent people from enganging in risky behavior because regulating people private decisions is beyond its authority. The government however can regulate when such a behavior affects others like where you smoke, require you to pay insurance for the inevitable medical care you will need and require tobacco companies to advertise against their own product if they wish to sell it. From cigarettes to fentanyl, it is not a government's place to prohibit a substance.

This seems strange because the government has been regulating what I’m allowed to do with my own body for awhile now, and keep coming up with new ones in fact.

But get out the pitchforks when they try to tell multinational corporations to stop selling death sticks to children!

Children are under parent/guardian supervision and they cannot make risk assesment and accept risk it makes sense to age restrict risky items.

What I said obviously speaks against your own body as well. The fact is if you have a secular government and a democratic one at that they lack authority to do many of the things they are doing. They exist to govern liberty not enforce world views and keep people from hurting themselves. Democracy should be like Unix, if you decide to shoot yourself in the foot it should enable you to do it in the most efficient way possible.