What is plain packaging of tobacco?

Packaging for all products can act as a form of promotion, marketing and advertising. This is even truer for tobacco because in countries where other advertising is restricted, the pack becomes the main means of promoting tobacco; and tobacco is a ‘badge product’ which people carry around with them and display every time they take the pack out.¹

Brightly colored and attractive branding distracts attention from the health warnings, and is attractive especially to young people as demonstrated in this campaign video produced by Cancer Research UK.

Even where misleading descriptors such as ‘light’ and ‘mild’ have been banned, branded packaging continues to create strong but false perceptions that some variants are less harmful than others. These ‘health reassurance’ brands use light and bright colors to mislead consumers and help to maintain addiction.

See Tobacco Pack Branding - Theory and Practice for full details about the use of packaging as a marketing tool by the tobacco industry. As a Philip Morris executive has stated ...

“Our final communication vehicle with our smoker is the pack itself. In the absence of any other marketing messages, our packaging...is the sole communicator of our brand essence. Put another way—when you don’t have anything else—our packaging is our marketing.”

In the legal claim in the Australian High Court, counsel for Japan Tobacco International argued that tobacco packaging acted like an advertising billboard. JTI claimed that Australia ...

is acquiring our billboard

3. Plain or Standardised?

The most commonly used term for the policy is ‘plain packaging’ – this is the term used by Australia and the WHO. But because packs retain the health warnings they are not literally ‘plain’, and the industry has tried to spread confusion about this. In the UK and Ireland the term used is ‘standardised packaging’. In France the term used is ‘neutral packaging’ and elsewhere governments have called it ‘generic packaging’. These are all different terms for the same policy.

4. How will Plain Packaging Work?

Plain packaging helps to change smoking attitudes and behaviors and reduce the overall demand for tobacco. It is likely to have a greater impact on younger people. Plain packaging:

• Reduces the appeal and attractiveness of tobacco products to consumers,

• Increases the noticeability and effectiveness of health warnings on the packaging of tobacco products,

• Reduces the ability of the packaging of tobacco products to mislead consumers about the harmful effects of smoking or using tobacco products.

See Guide 1.1: Set Policy Objectives for more details.

5. Does it Work – What Does the Evidence Say?

Yes. There have been five international systematic evidence reviews that considered all the peer reviewed research studies from around the globe on the impact of plain packaging on smoking behaviors and attitudes.² All concluded that the policy would be effective at contributing to its objectives.

In Australia, over 6 years of post-implementation data shows continued significant declines in smoking rates.³ The government’s post implementation review concluded that a 0.55 percentage point drop could be attributed to plain packaging (equivalent to 118,000 less people smoking⁴ over 3 years).

The UK and France fully implemented plain packaging in early 2017 and evidence is emerging of significant declines in smoking rates as well as changing attitudes to smoking in those countries.

The tobacco industry has refused to release any of its own internal research into the impacts of plain packaging. The studies the tobacco companies rely on to oppose plain packaging are almost universally not peer reviewed; are unverifiable; and either ignore or airily dismiss the global evidence that supports the policy being effective.⁵

See Guide 2.1: Evidence review, together with the pages on the Research Evidence and the Post Implementation Evidence in Australia, and in the UK and France, for fully referenced information on all the supporting evidence.