The Status Value of Cigarettes
By Ben Skoch

In this project, I examined how cigarettes are placed, through advertising and social situations, into a specific order of social function and status, along with the help of Clare Heath. This project was realized both through examinations of the interviews and advertising in the Marlboro Collection and through personal interviews of habitual smokers of several brands of cigarettes, Marlboros included, of course. This allowed me to contrast the social value that cigarette companies want to engender in their consumers with the actual perceived social consumptive value by customers. This project was intended to appeal both to those involved in this particular class and those who would like to contrast the 'ideal' of advertisers with the reality of how things can be taken and appropriated by consumers. Hopefully, those reading the project would take away an increased understanding of the methodology used by advertisers to attribute status value to their products.

I found that, on the whole, status values which are attributed to separate cigarette companies by consumers are related less to advertising than to particular social values. In brief, it would be an accurate statement to say that one's social group determines your particular social ranking of cigarettes rather than vice versa. Since the gross majority of those I interviewed were young college students, their perceptions of the 'types' of cigarette brands and smokers were skewed to a certain degree, but I feel that on the whole it did not influence the project adversely.