Vaping & Vaporizer News

Marketing e-liquids: targeting young people or returning to childhood?

We are seeing more and more brands of liquids adopting “sugar or energy drink” marketing codes…

While already the simple flavours that appeal to the tastes of childhood (vanilla, candy, cakes…) make the hair of many critics of vape, isn’t this tendency detrimental to its image? Worse still, wouldn’t the manufacturers’ objective be to really seduce young people and encourage them to vaporize, even those who don’t smoke?

Let’s think about it. What is the main vape kits market? Millions of smokers who wish to quit or millions of young people who have not yet put their lips on the slightest (real) cigarette? From this point of view, what is the easiest target for doing business?

Honestly, if I were a manufacturer, I would certainly choose the smokers’ market. This is obviously the best potential, immediately captive. Above and beyond the liquid, vape is a constraint of equipment and maintenance which requires a real effort. So at the young people’s level, the evangelization of the practice is a barrier, or at least a retarder, to rapidly develop the sales of my products.

So the manufacturers are idiots, do they have the wrong target?

Doesn’t this “candy” marketing simply appeal to the regressive side of the adult, who is not content to stop smoking,”having fun” with an alternative to smoking, where the notion of pleasure has completely replaced the guilt of smoking. The search for pleasing and original flavours is fundamental for steamers, and open competition (unlike tobacco) stimulates manufacturers’ creativity. There is not only the delicacy atmosphere, but also many other “universes” among the manufacturers: cooking / pastry, perfumery, spirits, cocktails, fruit, menthols, breakfast cereals, tea, coffee, tobacco / cigar (inevitably…).

Yet the tobacco industry has just been banned from adding attractive flavours to avoid seducing young people. This satisfies the anti-tobacco frightened by e-cig, which also asks the actors of the vape to completely banish the reference to tobacco.

No pleasure, no tobacco, would the future of a “reasonable” vape be without aroma, at the risk of seducing no one?

A study conducted by two researchers in the United States and published by Addictive Behaviors magazine, demonstrates the impact of electronic cigarettes on smoking cessation. It found that more than half of the people who sprayed daily quit smoking for the next five years. This is the highest rate found in demographic and behavioural subgroups, the study says. Among two groups surveyed, smokers who had previously vaporized were more likely to quit smoking than smokers who had never vaporized.

Daniel Giovenco of Columbia University and Christine Delnevo of the Rutgers School of Public Health conducted a study on the habits of smokers who have already used vaporization. The analysis was based on data from the 2014 and 2015 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) surveys. They concern 15,532 people who are still smokers or who quit smoking after 2010. And for good reason, steaming did not really appear on the American market until that year. It was therefore only from this period onward that it was really possible to measure the impact of using vaporization for smoking cessation. In addition,”the use of vape is extremely rare in ex-smokers who quit before Vape was available and in people who never smoked,”according to the study.

Daily vapers more prone to smoking cessation

The use of daily vaping is strongly related to smoking cessation, according to the researchers who conducted this study. 25% of all people surveyed (smokers or recent ex-smokers) quit smoking. 5.1% of them vape daily and 52.2% have quit smoking. For example, those who use vapes daily are three times more likely to quit smoking than those who have never tried it before. The researchers put forward two hypotheses for this, which do not in any way represent assertions on the use of vape kits for stopping cigarettes, because of the “cross-sectional nature of the survey”. The first is that smokers use vaporization to stop smoking. The second concerns ex-smokers, who use it to prevent relapse into tobacco.

Occasional vapers less likely to stop smoking

Smokers or recent ex-smokers involved in the survey who occasionally use vape, or who have tried and stopped smoking, are less likely to stop smoking. They are even less likely to quit than smokers who have never smoked. The reasons for this failure to quit smoking in occasional vaporizers remain unclear, due to deficiencies in the NHIS survey questionnaires. According to the article, the public health community believes that “some smokers, instead of trying to quit smoking, intermittently use vaporization in places where they cannot smoke”. The absence of products adapted to their needs or those whose effectiveness is not proven, or simply the absence of a real desire to stop smoking may also be the causes. According to the researchers, future studies that incorporate comprehensive measures of vaporization use, such as frequency, material characteristics, and individual factors such as smoking dependence, should shed more light on the relationship between vaporization and smoking cessation.