The architecture of cigarette circulation: marketing work on Indonesia's retail infrastructure

Abstract

The cigarette industry mobilizes independent retail as the scaffolding for ubiquitous cigarette advertising and sales in Indonesia, forming an expansive semiotic and material architecture of cigarette circulation in a country with limited tobacco regulations. As impending regulations threaten to curb cigarette advertising, and independent retailers face stiff competition from mushrooming chain convenience stores, Philip Morris International's Indonesian subsidiary has developed a retail community programme to recruit and ‘modernize’ select retailers. The programme has intensified the quotidian labour of marketers who use knowledge, persons, and things to inhabit and renovate independent retail. I show how fashioning cigarette markets entails fashioning retail infrastructure, and is embedded in intimate relations of power, care, and violence.

Tobacco company agreements with tobacco retailers for price discounts and prime placement of products and advertising: a scoping review

“…Seventeen studies were conducted in the USA,6 14 17 23–36 three in Australia,37–39 two in the UK,8 15 two in South Korea7 40 and one each in Canada,41 New Zealand,42 and Indonesia 43. The earliest was published in 199114 and the most recent were published in 2020 17 25 38 39.…”

“…No included papers explicitly examined manufacturers’ use of contracts in economies where cigarettes are more likely to be purchased in the ‘informal’ economy. Of the 27 included studies, 23 (85%) used a cross-sectional design, 2 reported data from two time points,15 31 and 1 reported longitudinal data 43…”

“…The most reported requirements described how tobacco products and advertising must be displayed in the store 6 7 14 15 17 23–26 28 29 32 34–40 42 43. For example, one retailer interviewed in the UK reported reserving two-thirds of their tobacco unit space for a contracted manufacturer15 and another in the USA recounted that manufacturer representatives required 45% of the tobacco retail space to be dedicated to that particular manufacturer 29.…”

The Limits of Corporate Chains and Brand Management: “Loyalty” and the Efficacy of Vernacular Markets in the Andes

“…Anthropological studies on counterfeit products and sales, mostly concerned with imitations of international fashion brands in places as Nigeria, Vietnam, and Guatemala (Guyer 2004;Vann 2006;Thomas 2013), have shown that customers do not necessarily distinguish products along the simple binary matrix of the fake versus the original, or the copy versus the real brand. This binary is codified in international IPR and related to Western notions of ownership and authenticity (Thomas 2013;Dewey 2020), but it does not hold everywhere.…”

“…In La Paz as elsewhere (Vann 2006), customers tend to make pragmatic judgments about whether a product is worthwhile or not. The average customer does not perceive a copy as necessarily bad or fraudulent.…”