Abstract
After being brought back from the New World and being cultivated first in Portugal during the 16th century, tobacco has gradually become a good for mass consumption all around the world, passing from a status of medicinal plant to the one of a luxury product and eventually to something very cool, that everybody, even the poorest, can afford. But this sharp image that occurred during the first part of the second half of the 20th century, beginning with the American GI's smoking cigarettes and then spread by stars smoking, evolved into a new much less attractive image. The cigarette gradually stopped being something cool and became something that kills 500,000 people a year only in Europe. People realized that it multiplies the risks of lung cancer by 10, and reduces the life expectancy by 8 to 10 years for those who smoke more than half of packet a day and so on and so forth… As a matter of fact, tobacco companies have had to change their marketing strategies to face this new vision of tobacco among the public opinion.
