How Vape Sellers Use Marketing Tricks to Target Young People

Recently, all kinds of vaping devices have flooded the market. In the race to capture the youth market, many e-cigarette sellers keep rolling out new marketing tricks, creating hidden risks. Just how “popular” are e-cigarettes in young people’s daily lives? Can vaping really help with both “fitness” and “beauty”? And how well is the “minors prohibition” on e-cigarettes being enforced? These issues have drawn widespread attention.

How do e-cigarette sellers target young people with marketing tricks?

——Playing the “values card”: under the guise of promoting values, they are actually promoting e-cigarettes. Recently, an article describing the emotional journey of an e-cigarette salesperson appeared across multiple online social platforms and youth groups. In addition to using polished writing to describe the salesperson’s “struggle” and growth, the article also emphasized viewpoints such as: “Qualified e-cigarettes have less impact on the body than traditional cigarettes and do not cause secondhand smoke harm to people nearby. Therefore, e-cigarettes are a ‘harm reduction’ product and the best substitute for cigarettes.”

Investigations found that the article was in fact a promotional “soft article” for an e-cigarette brand. PR staff sent the article link to multiple WeChat groups of 500 people at the same time, adding suggested repost text and WeChat red packet incentives to encourage sharing. Industry insiders say this is also a commonly used method in current e-cigarette brand promotion.

——Playing the “health card”: claiming that vaping can help people quit smoking, improve fitness, and enhance beauty. Many e-cigarette brands not only avoid discussing the harms of nicotine and other ingredients in their products, but also market themselves as “healthy.” Some claim their products contain vitamins, collagen, melatonin, lactic acid bacteria, and other beneficial ingredients, and that using them not only does not harm the body, but can also boost immunity, support beauty and anti-aging, refresh the mind, calm the nerves and aid sleep, benefit the spleen and protect the lungs, relieve fatigue, and ease hangovers...

——Playing the “entrepreneurship card”: using “starting a business” as a slogan to encourage young people to become agents and boost popularity. “Pay 6,000 yuan in product purchases to become a second-tier distributor, 30,000 yuan to become a first-tier distributor, and 150,000 yuan to directly become a co-founder.” It is understood that some companies specifically recruit young people—especially young women—as sales agents, guiding them to promote e-cigarettes to their peers by posting on Moments with carefully crafted fashionable and upscale imagery, and by building vaping social circles.

The World Health Organization has stated that adolescents’ exposure to nicotine may cause long-term adverse effects on brain development and may lead to learning disorders, anxiety disorders, and other problems. It recommends “prohibiting the marketing and use of electronic nicotine delivery systems to non-smokers, pregnant women, and young people; and prohibiting unproven health claims about electronic nicotine delivery systems.”