Marlboro Man

Birth of the Marlboro Man

After deciding to introduce filters to the brand [in the 1950's], Marlboro executives still had the brand's feminine image to deal with. . . . It didn't help that filtered cigarettes were considered softer versions of the real thing, cigarettes for sissies.

For help, Marlboro turned to Leo Burnett's advertising company. In a 1972 documentary, Burnett recalled the brainstorming session in which they stumbled upon their icon.

"I said, 'What's the most masculine symbol you can think of?' And right off the top of his head one of these writers spoke up and said a cowboy. And I said, 'That's for sure.'"

The first Marlboro men weren't limited to cowboys. They were all sorts of rugged individuals who smoked their cigarettes while performing equally manly tasks, from fixing their cars to fishing or hunting.

The rather abrupt advertising about-face sparked a similar turn in sales. By 1957, Marlboro's sales were skyrocketing. . . .

As American politics became more complicated in the 1960s, Jack Landry, the Marlboro brand manager at Philip Morris, saw an opening into which the cowboy fit like a glove.

"In a world that was becoming increasingly complex and frustrating for the ordinary man," Landry explained, "the cowboy represented an antithesis -- a man whose environment was simplistic and relatively pressure free. He was his own man in a world he owned."

Marlboro's television advertisements in the '60s reflected the idea of freedom in wide-open spaces, especially once the theme from the movie The Magnificent Seven was added to the scenes of cowboys leading their herds through dusty canyons of "Marlboro Country" or charging off to rein in a stray colt.

Part of the success of the campaign might be attributable to the fact that Marlboro forged some credibility by using real cowboys in some of the ads instead of actors just playing the part.

The image took hold with enough force that even though a ban on televised tobacco advertisements that began in 1971, the Marlboro Man survived unharmed. Instead of riding off into the sunset, the image turned up in print ads and on billboards all over the country.

^{Source: ''Present at the Creation.'' NPR Morning Edition. October 21, 2002. http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/marlboroman/}

Historian Interpretation

In a sense, . . . the cowboy [was an] oppressed worker, or at least one who apparently had little chance to rise to a higher level, something that ran counter to the American tradition. Futilely he tried to object, as did eastern workers, and there were efforts to organize and to strike. The Knights of Labor had a good many cowboys on its rolls. . . .

If one looks more closely at the Marlboro Man, one will notice that in most of these advertisements he is no mere cowpoke. He is a stockman, a mature American with the proper wrinkles around his eyes to prove that he has been out of doors, but his dress is that of an owner, not of an employee—a businessman with roots, with property; and he is not a drifter. He is solid and conservative.

^{Source: Athearn, Robert. The Mythic West. University of Kansas Press, 1986. 266, 269.}