A Hoffman Estates letter to the editor: In a recent Guest View, Ashley Gould, chief communications officer for JUUL, says her company "never marketed to youth, period. Our market has always been one billion adult smokers worldwide."
In a recent Guest View, Ashley Gould, chief communications officer for JUUL, says her company "never marketed to youth, period. Our market has always been one billion adult smokers worldwide." She is such a liar.
According to researchers from Stanford University, the entire first two years of JUUL advertising was aimed almost entirely at young people. "JUUL exploited social media, where American middle and high school kids live. That was an innovation," they wrote.
Young adults with large Instagram followings promoted its products with colorful images of young people JUULing, and doing fun tricks with their JUUL device. Young people distributed free JUULs at movies and concerts. The favorite JUUL flavors were mango, fruit, crème, and mint; for a while they sold watermelon, strawberry, and peanut butter and jelly. Were they targeting longtime adult smokers?
Did it work? Absolutely! Teenagers have 16 times greater odds of using JUUL than 25-34 year olds. JUUL use is epidemic among junior high and high schoolchildren, many of whom never realized they were inhaling highly addictive nicotine in addition to the sweet, fruity flavors.
Now JUUL is responding to horrible publicity. New ads feature adults who switched to the JUUL product after years of smoking cigarettes; their best-selling flavors are tobacco and menthol. But word-of-mouth advertising still works best, and JUUL is overwhelmingly the bestseller among schoolchildren.
And although JUUL no longer sells fruity flavors, other companies have stepped into the vacuum and sell dozens of different sweet, kid-approved, JUUL-compatible flavor pods.
Ashley Gould would have us believe that the teen-targeted ad campaign that successfully made JUUL so popular with our children and profitable to its shareholders never really happened. "We appreciate the opportunity to clarify these misconceptions surrounding our company," she wrote.
What a liar.
Steve Loh
Hoffman Estates