Market Research, Ethics and Smoking

Most countries now have very graphic warnings on cigarette packets. The following exercise involves some market research with your students on which warnings may be the most effective and then includes an “ethical twist” at the end!

The scenario is that your students are part of a focus group that a market research company is running to investigate which warning labels are most likely to discourage consumers from starting and / or continuing smoking. You will have to find ten different warning labels and this is easily done via google images. As each image is shown to the students I get them to rate it out of ten in terms of how effective it is. Once all the images have been shown, we have a discussion about the images that were rated by the majority of the students as the most effective, and the least effective.

Once this is all finished, I tell them that the market research was paid for by a tobacco company and they are going to use the results to only use the least effective warnings on the packets. Tobacco companies probably wouldn’t have any qualms at all about doing this but the ethical issues for the market research company are certainly worth discussing. Should the participants have been told prior to the research? Is it any different to an advertising company designing adverts? How many students would be prepared to work for a tobacco company?

I then finish off with getting the students to think of their own slogans and display them with this cigarette packet image generator.