In the good old days, the tobacco industry had a strategic marketing playbook script that worked something like this:

• emphasize personal responsibility for choosing to smoke
• pay scientists to deliver research that instills doubt about risks
• criticize the “junk science” that finds harms associated with smoking
• make self-regulatory pledges
• lobby with massive resources to stifle government action
• introduce “safer” products
• simultaneously manipulate and deny both the addictive nature of tobacco products and marketing said products to children

The compelling question asked by researchers Drs. Kelly Brownell and Kenneth Warner is this:   How does the script of the modern food industry compare to that tobacco industry script?  Continue reading →