Bar-Based Interventions to Counteract Tobacco Promotions Targeting Young Adults

Background: Tobacco companies and public health authorities recognize young adulthood as a critical time when experimenters either quit or transition to regular tobacco use. Tobacco industry marketing campaigns often target young adults in social environments such as bars/nightclubs, but tobacco control programs rarely visit these venues. A unique social marketing model was used to design interventions to compete with these marketing efforts.

Program background: Three different campaigns were developed to target three different young adult cultures—Commune (CA – For “Hipsters”), HAVOC (NM – For “Partiers”) and Crush (NV – For LGBT). Each campaign used a unique variation of social marketing called “Social Branding” to associate living tobacco-free with the values and identity of the subcultures it targeted. Primary campaign components included social media, paid digital media, bar and club events, brand ambassadors and direct mail. Monthly campaign events were held only in smoke-free venues that did not accept tobacco industry sponsorship. Each of the campaigns sponsored and promoted local DJs, bands, and other performers that would attract the intended audience. The events featured trained brand ambassadors, who were popular young adults within each subculture and who could express their reasons for maintaining a smoke-free lifestyle to their peers.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Focus groups were conducted in each state prior to campaign launch. A pre-post test time series cross-sectional study was designed for each campaign, with a baseline and multiple follow-ups including at least 2,000 young adults per state. Tobacco use reductions among young adults at bars and clubs were observed in all 3 sites: Relative tobacco use rate reductions of 16% in CA, 25.1% NM and 13.8% in NV. Reductions were concentrated in the targeted young adult subcultures and were present among both non-daily and daily tobacco users.

Conclusions: Tobacco industry promotions deliberately target young adults in bars and nightclubs. These venues are social environments where social behaviors like tobacco use are formed. These factors lead to higher rates of tobacco use among certain bar-going subcultures.  The unique social marketing methodology employed by these three campaigns led to tobacco use reductions in their target audiences; these methods could be reproduced by other tobacco control and behavior change campaigns which target subcultures.

Implications for research and/or practice: Incorporating a subculture’s values and norms into a behavior change campaign’s strategies appears to be a promising strategy to reduce young adult tobacco use.  This methodology has demonstrated impact in three distinct sites with three distinct young adult cultures. Broader implementations of this model should be considered to reduce young adult tobacco use rates.