Don't Aim That Pack at Us

By MICHAEL QUINN

To keep alive their shrinking market, tobacco companies have shown marketing genius by creating more than 300 brands that variously boast of being longer, slimmer, cheaper, flavored, microfiltered, pastel colored or even striped. A new R.J. Reynolds brand called Uptown looks typically glitzy with its black- and-gold box and promise of a tasty menthol blend. But the cigarette has provoked a response its maker never anticipated: passionate protest. Last week the tobacco company, which intended to begin test-marketing the cigarette next month in Philadelphia, canceled those plans after community groups and health organizations vehemently criticized the product. The reason: Uptown is the first cigarette aimed specifically at African-American smokers.

To R.J. Reynolds, Uptown is simply a product designed to appeal to a particular market segment. To critics, it represents the cold-blooded targeting of blacks, who suffer a lung-cancer rate 58% higher than whites. Uptown's opponents won powerful support last week when Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, blasted the cigarette-marketing plan. Said he: "Uptown's message is more disease, more suffering and more death for a group already bearing more than its share of smoking-related illness and mortality." R.J. Reynolds, for its part, denounced the "unfair and biased attention" that had been focused on its product by a "small coalition of antismoking zealots."

As cigarette consumption has fallen in the U.S., tobacco companies have increasingly directed their marketing to specific groups, such as women, Hispanics and blacks. While 30.5% of white males smoke, 39% of blacks do. Uptown was carefully researched and designed: everything from its name to its packaging was tailored to the tastes of the black consumer. "If we were Sears developing a line of clothing for blacks," says a Reynolds spokeswoman, "this would pass without any notice."

Not all blacks appreciate the protest. Civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks sees it as a form of paternalism. "Buried in this line of thinking," he wrote recently, "is the rationale that blacks are not capable of making their own free choices." His comments reflect the reluctance of some black groups to attack tobacco companies, which have donated money to support events and causes ranging from jazz festivals to the United Negro College Fund.

Nonetheless, the Uptown controversy underscores a growing concern that big corporations have targeted minority communities as lucrative markets for such products as tobacco, liquor and even junk food. A survey in Baltimore found that 20% of billboard advertising in white communities was devoted to smoking and drinking. In black neighborhoods 76% of the billboards promoted such vices.

With reporting by John F. McDonald/Washington and Don Winbush/Atlanta