Cigarettes were marketed to women as a diet aid.

Evidence

At roughly the same time that the boss called in Bernays, Lasker was also tasked with engineering greater demand among women for Lucky Strike. This was the beginning of the “Reach for a Lucky” campaign. Far cruder and more conventional than Bernays’s effort, it also likely sold more cigarettes to women than all the torches of Easter. Lasker started from advertising’s most tried and true premise, borrowed from patent medicine: cigarettes needed to be a cure for something—if not sore throats, then what? Noticing that women often expressed concern about their weight, he came up with the idea of selling Lucky Strike as a remedy for excess weight, a diet aid. The original slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Bon-Bon” soon became “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” and would long be remembered simply as “Reach for a Lucky.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 241

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Parallels the ‘Grafting’ piece in that both show advertising repurposing one appetite for another — here weight concern transplanted onto cigarette desire.
• XREF: connects to: Bernays recruited debutantes by selling public smoking as a women’s rights act — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1255; Cigarette advertising sold smoking as youthful freedom and women’s liberation — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1694; 1930s cigarette ads sold fear of weight gain and aging. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 242 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• 1930s cigarette ads sold fear of weight gain and aging. #expands (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 242
• Cigarette advertising sold smoking as youthful freedom and women’s liberation #expands (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1694
• Advertising’s targeted appeal to women began when companies realized women did most household purchasing #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 208