Thursday, August 27, 2009
And Philip Morris didn’t come up with this?
From the stuff I think about folder, I got followed by a Green Cigarette on Twitter (since banned), but this thing stuck with me. E-cigarettes people. No, yeah, electronic cigarettes. At first, I was definitely like wtf, but, if you take the arguement that cigarettes are just a nicotine delivery system, as soda and coffee are for caffeine, and that the smoke is what annoys non-smokers (as well as being unhealthy for all), then why not focus on a delivery system for what smokers really want: Nicotine. Sure there’s the patch, but the idea there is withdrawl, not finding a way to continue. E-cigs seem like enough of a wtf idea though that would shut non-smokers up, even if the little LED light at the end provides endless hours of hilarity as smokers fuck with non-smokers in restaurants. Good idea for Philip Morris though. Offer both smoke and smokeless products! Hey, if Kodak switched from film to digi... wait, what, they are? Oh. Nevermind.
And, you can do those smoke rings too while your roommate walks in on your product review.
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2 comments:
I have my doubts about this:
1. People who smoke aren't that concerned with being healthy. If they want to be healthy, they'll try to quit.
2. The smoker-icons don't care about being healthy. The Marlboro man is not the kind of guy who hopes he doesn't get emphysema in twenty years—he's the kind of guy who dies shoeing a horse, falling down a canyon, or during a bar fight. The skinny, black-clad hyperintellectual smoker doesn't care about his health because he doesn't care about anything. That would be lame.
3. You've got the same stigma from non-smokers ("How can you be addicted to something so stupid?") plus a new stigma from smokers ("You like sucking off a battery to get your fix?"). That leaves the e-smoke buyer pretty much alone.
4. The law won't catch up with reality: people probably will get in trouble for smoking these where smoking is banned. Somebody out there will interpret the law liberally enough to do it.
These feel like a good idea, at first. But they're only appealing to non-smokers.
I vaguely recall Philip Morris playing with technology decades ago as described in the book Barbarians at the Gate. They broomed the idea of the smokeless cigarette. I think it was because such a development would suggest there was a problem with "normal" cigarettes. Of course, we know how right they are.
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