A standard nailed-wood cigar box is made of six pieces of wood, resulting in twelve sides. What makes those sides interesting today is that only one of them, the bottom, was regulated by the Federal government or any other agency. Said another way, only the bottom was required, by law, to be true.
That left eleven sides open to the imagination of the marketer to picture or claim absolutely any-thing he wanted. The phrase “cigar industry” includes factories, salesmen, wholesalers, brokers, jobbers, retailers and smokers, and they were almost all men. As a result, what was said, done, pictured or claimed was pretty much whatever men liked and wanted to see or hear.
But, unlike other products where a few or few hundred people decided what men want...the cigar industry involved literally millions of people in the process. Because cigar brands and boxes were so easily and cheaply customized, every wholesaler, retailer and smoker could and did get into the act by creating his own custom brand.
The result is advertising anarchy at its finest.
As pioneers, they tried a lot of ideas, both good and bad. There were no precedents, polls or web-sites to advise against using dead moose, skunks, goats, drunks, spiders, wasps, rattle snakes, funerals and Satan to sell cigars. Sellers had to learn to focus on pretty girls, dogs, cute kids, sports, celebrities, good health, good times, wealth and more pretty girls instead. Experimentation was constant. Close to two million brands of cigars reached the shelves of America’s retailers. Cigars were sold under more brand names than any other product in history.
Themes can be arbitrarily grouped into forty or fifty different categories.
Enjoy.
Advertising Themes on Labels
A National Cigar Museum Exclusive Gallery
© Tony Hyman
