Big Wide World

apparently, smokers want a smoke after seeing health labels:

"A three-year, $7 million neuromarketing study done in Oxford, England has found that cigarette health warning labels actually make smokers want to smoke more, not less. Neuromarketing research studies how the brain reacts to various types of marketing stimuli. Researchers studied 2,000 people from five different countries using sophisticated brain-testing technology, like electroencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to gain a better understanding of consumer behavior. A surprising finding involved the health warning labels placed on cigarette packs. Researchers asked subjects if the warning labels worked to help them reduce smoking, and most said "yes." But when they repeated the same question while flashing images of the labels to the subjects while they underwent an MRI, they found that the images activated "craving spots" in the brain, indicating that the health warnings actually encourage smokers to smoke more." Source: Advertising Age, October 21, 2008

The study comes from the book Buyology, by Martin Lindstrom (Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Chapters). He examines the conscious and subconscious motivations behind our needs to buy (and buy and buy) and puts the study in contexts of neuromarketing, the study of marketing in terms of sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses to marketing stimuli (check out neuro science marketing blog here).

I would have to read the study on the link between health warning labels and smoking in order to evaluate it, but it appears that there is a legitimate question on whether its the labels that prompted the craving to smoke or the seeing the actual cigarette (package). I would hope that the book would address that issue.