A Marketing take on weird stuff: Cigarettes & Sigma Males
Let’s go over how the internet radicalized “manhood” in the mid 00’s, how that has come back 15 years later, and how it follows the cigarette marketing playbook that has shaped culture since the 1930's.
In January of 2021, a new man dropped on the internet.
“Sigma males” is a weird resurgence of something that should have stayed in the land of dead memes and fads: pickup artists, “The Game,” and the entire hierarchy of alpha and beta males. It’s the newest, and apparently rarest, type of man a man can be.
This feels dangerous because the last time this sort of thing happened it ruined fedoras, started a wave of eugenics research in alpha vs beta males (Chads), gave rise to the incel subculture, sadly empowered people like Elliot Rodger, and is now the bane of various feminist movements and LGBTQ+ organizations. Sigma Males feels like a step backward and at a glance, seems relatively harmless.
It is a little cringey, and a little sad, but it is also popular. Sigma males are like a new, more reserved, alt-alpha: just as successful and competent but minus the bravado. Many of the youtube videos on sigma males feature John Wick in the cover art and the words “lone wolf” somewhere in the description (these videos are titled things like “Top 10 signs you are a Sigma” and “Why Sigmas are more attractive”). Most of the videos were created around January 2021, and as of March, are nearing close to millions of views or have at least several hundreds of thousands.
Despite a lot of the videos and books on Sigma Males, there doesn’t really appear to be a point. All that’s really happened is that they’ve given a new name for solitary, cool, bachelor behavior. There isn’t really the same outward call to action to buy products, “neg” women, or watch spinoff shows on Spike TV.
So is this fine?
Not really. The way “Sigma males” appeared on the internet is a move directly from a very, effective marketing playbook used by the cigarette industry to shape culture and prey on people’s hopes and desires. Creating a new term (identifier) for people to recognize is the brilliant move that brands use when their product isn’t just dead, but actively discouraged by the public (sometimes referred to as Stage 5 in a product lifecycle). Cigarette companies have been using this to an extreme effect for years, despite best efforts by a lot of smart people to stop them. It works, sometimes a little bit too well.
It’s actually kind of weird how similar the two situations are. You can draw a direct line between cigarettes and Sigma males. The implication here is that seemingly harmless terms like “Sigma males” can act like a slow poison to create really good profits for a few and really terrible results for the many years later. It is a small term that is easy to overlook and given enough time can create something awful.
So in an effort to stop some potentially damaging consequences, let’s jump straight into it:
About 100 years ago in the 1920’s, cigarette ads used to look a bit like this.
It’s not that cigarettes were actually good for you, nor did doctors really recommend them. The cigarette industry was competing to sell, and in order to sell more, had gotten to the point of promising that cigarettes are better than candy, doctors say they are healthy, and that smoking will make you more virile and handsome.
Cigarettes at this point were predominantly selling this story to men (hence the virile and handsome bit). But these stories get debunked by the FDA, who said that “no, cigarettes aren’t good for you. Stop saying that.” Also people were catching on that despite the advertising, cigarettes did not make you virile and handsome.
People, mostly men at this point, began to lose interest because they didn’t believe the story. Cigarettes had the nickname “coffin nail.”
“Say, sport, have you got a coffin nail on you?” — O Henry short story, 1906.
People still smoked, but not as much as the industry would have liked. The industry was in Stage 5 of the product life cycle: “dead” product, where people do not believe in the ads nor the product.
The move that works is giving prospective customers something to identify themselves with. It works best if the prospects are far enough away that they haven’t really been considered before, but close enough that they are curious about the product.
How about women smokers?
It took 4 words and an image. It’s not great how well this ad worked. Women knew of cigarettes, but in the early 1900’s smoking was just not “socially respectable”. It was what soldiers did after battles. But the trend of women smokers was there and Chesterfield accelerated it. They accelerated it a lot.
The “BLOW SOME MY WAY” ad doesn’t really promise anything nor is it really asking women to do anything. Objectively it’s an innocuous message, but it opens the world of cigarettes to women. It shifts cigarettes from battlefields (this era is after WW1 and around the Spanish Civil War) to moonlit romantic nights. This ad says “we know you are curious about this. You don’t need to get cigarettes, but don’t you just want to enjoy that sweet smoke?”
Like it or not, this ad forces the conversation from “are cigarettes ok?” to “do I want to participate or not?” It’s a subtle shift, but it forces a new group of people to think of themselves in relation to the product rather than question the product itself. Classic marketing move.
Years later this message gets built upon and transformed. By the time the cigarette industry needs to shift again decades later, the ads are promising that “cigarettes will make you skinny and beautiful” and that “Smoking helps you lose fat.” By the 1950’s, the cigarette ads were in the same place as they were in the 1920’s, except they were making promises to women, not to men. It took about 30 years for the cigarette industry to go from creating an ad for women to identify with to telling them to smoke cigarettes to look skinny (the doctor approved diet).
The marketer, Eugene Schwartz, writes an entire chapter in his textbook on advertising about how well this message targeted women at the time and brought them into the cigarette industry fold.
This type of message is used to take people who would have otherwise gone a different way.
The term “Sigma male” is the “BLOW SOME MY WAY” ad, just in a different industry:
Sigma males is the new Stage 5 marketing ploy from a dying, actively discouraged, industry with a sordid history. Just like the cigarette industry circa 1920.
Manhood as an industry has been around for a while but it really took a new shape in the early 00’s. In 2005, Tucker Max and Mystery (the pick up artist a.k.a. Erik von Markovik) were piggy backing on the bachelor cultural bedrock carved out by Hugh Hefner. Neil Strauss published “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.”
Everything was based on the “science” of alpha-beta wolves where men exist on a hierarchy from the James Bonds at the top to the Kirk Van Houtens at the bottom. These artists swore by a set of cheat codes for women that will allow any man to sleep with whoever they want.
This doesn’t work for a lot of reasons. Quick honorable mention to the wolf biologist David Mech who introduced the concept of alpha-beta wolves. He has spent the last few decades debunking his own research and trying to convince people to stop applying a study he wrote on wolves in captivity to men trying to go on dates.
By 2010, groups like “Red Pill” and “PUAHate” (pickup artist hate) spring up. They still resonated with the substance of the alpha-beta pyramid, but said that the cheat codes for relationships do not work. They don’t believe in the story. Some people in this world start to believe that they could never be an “alpha” because their bone structure is wrong. People who are betas or deltas are doomed to be forever alone unless they get cosmetic surgery. Incidentally, “Forever Alone” became the major forum for the incel (involuntary celibates) online subculture.
This is followed by many tragic, violent acts around the US and Canada. It’s based on a very wrong and dangerous idea which some men in the alpha-beta world start to believe, that women are biologically irrational. These men then become radicalized and violent. There are a lot of reasons why this happened but a huge part of it is because the alpha-beta hierarchy created a foundation for dangerous groups to flourish around. People at large condemn this type of thinking.
A lot of society is not wanting to be aware of the alpha-beta pyramid and is denouncing it. The manhood as an industry is in Stage 5.
Again, the marketing move that always works is to create a new identifier specifically targeted towards people adjacent to this world who may be aware of it but have not yet gotten swept up by it. The goal isn’t to sell anything or really tell anyone to do anything (yet), but to just make a name for people to identify with.
This new population could be loner kids in their formative years perhaps with some confidence issues who are old enough and close enough to know the term “alpha” but not identify with it or the predatory nature that the pyramid evokes.
“Sigma males” are lone wolf types who exist outside the pyramid, are super rare, super desirable, driven, but think for themselves and don’t play “the Game.” The identifier is perfect. The point is not to question whether the pyramid is right or wrong, but to make people consider themselves in relation to it. The manhood-as-an-industry depends on people not questioning the pyramid.
It sort of sucks how well this move brings people into a world they would have otherwise avoided.
It’s just the beginning of a longer sequence of targeted messages that only help ingrain the alpha-beta pyramid deeper in society:
This message is seemingly harmless but it is the beginning of a long series of messaging that can drastically shape culture. Going back to cigarettes for a second, it is possible to suss out what to expect.
With cigarettes, the goal of the industry is to always secure its place as a staple in society. The next time the industry had to create an identifier after the “BLOW SOME MY WAY” ad was in the late 50's. They created the rural, independent, Marlboro Man. He was designed to be a rugged cowboy belonging out on the frontier. He didn’t need fashion or style. He was quiet, outdoorsy, and a man of action. In 1960, Marlboro bought the rights to create the soundtrack for the western “Magnificent Seven” movie. They also sponsored a lot of “cowboy” cook books and clothing lines based on jeans and fur. Strangely enough, the biggest fad in the U.S. at the time were cowboys and spaghetti westerns. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement was very much underway. The Marlboro Man was designed as an identifier for white men. The cigarette industry therefore had to create similar identifiers around masculinity but for black men because they knew the Marlboro Man would not work well. They needed the exact opposite.
The menthol cigarette brand Kool built itself to be the thematic opposite of the Marlboro Man. Kool masculinity was designed around urban style, effortlessness, fashion, wit, and irony. At the time, Kool primarily advertised over radio and associated itself with soul, then jazz, and later hip hop music. Reading between the lines it becomes pretty clear who Kool was targeting.
Interesting fact: at the time, radio advertising was what marketers used to target the black population.
There is a really great paper that brilliantly covers how the cigarette industry cemented itself in culture by creating diverse ideas of masculinity for men to latch onto in the context of their products.
Once this sort of image is established, the cigarette industry is safe to build new ideas and write new ads because they have a firm hold on a group of people. At this stage of marketing, it becomes really difficult to undo any damages and usually requires specific government regulation and long term campaigns like Truth.
In the case of Sigma males, the identifier is basically geared to white teenagers in a similar way as the Marlboro Man was to white adults. A lot of the youtube narration happens on top of photos of forests and tents and evoking the solitary, gritty, rugged lifestyle.
In the future there will most likely be a lot more direct campaigns aimed to diversify the image. Probably along different geographic or racial lines.
The point is to build diverse, deep, roots in internet subcultures on the principles of the alpha-beta pyramid. It creates more ways for vulnerable young men to orient themselves around these principles, which in turn legitimizes the hierarchy. Only after this do you start to see more outwardly commercial messaging and direct “calls to action.”
To stop horrible consequences from happening there should be more direct condemnation for this type of radicalization and providing vulnerable people in their formative years more diverse and healthy identifiers and role models.
Be good.
