As someone who’s never smoked and never wants to pick up the habit, I’m nevertheless fascinated by the amount of different brands of cigarettes, and the loyalty that people seem to have to their particular type.
So, I’d like to hear from smokers on this one: How did you discover what your favorite brand of cigarette is? Did you shop around and try many kinds? Did you get a recommendation from a friend or family member?
My best friend in high school handed me a Marlboro light after a graduation party and I smoked for a couple of weeks and decided it wasn’t for me. Then my GF in college broke my heart and I picked up her pack of Marlboro lights and started smoking them. Smoked them for a few months and said screw these things.
When I started drinking in my mid-forties you could still smoke in bars, so I started smoking when I drank. And of course they were Marlboro lights.
Stopped doing and smoking over two years ago now and still don’t miss either. What stupid habits they both are.
But to answer the question, I choose to smoke what my friends were smoking.
My friends all smoked Camel Lights. That’s pretty much it. Camel remained my “main” brand for my entire smoking tenure, about 15 years of regular smoking total, plus another maybe 4-5 of bumming and social smoking after I’d “quit.” Haven’t had one in at least a decade now.
I was familiar with most other brands. I would occasionally buy a pack of Winston, Kool Milds, or Parliament just to change things up.
I tried different brands. For years I smoked Tarryton Lights. When they got hard to find I switched to Marlboro Lights. They were, and still are, available at any store that still carries cigarets.
And in answer to a nonsmoker, yes different brands do taste somewhat different, and once you get used to one, you don’t want to change. I don’t drink coffee, but my wife is currently frustrated that the dark French roast she picked up on sale is actually a light French roast, so it’s the same feeling.
As someone who used to smoke, I sort of am too. Back in my smoking days (late 80s-early 2000s) pretty much everyone I knew smoked some level of Marlboros, Lights, Reds or sometimes Mediums (though stock on those was always hit and miss). A distant second place was Camels and I don’t remember anyone who smoked a brand like Winstons, Salem, Parliaments, etc. A few girls might have smoked some menthol brand. My mom smokes Virginia Slims but that’s a total mom cigarette anyway. When you were broke, you bought GPCs (basically cheap generic type) but no one could stand to smoke those for more than a week.
Sometimes my friends and I would be dumb and buy a pack of some weirdo brand based on the box but we always returned to Marlboros immediately after. I suppose it was somewhat self-perpetuating since, if someone was going to bum a smoke and pick up the habit, they were probably borrowing from a Marlboro smoker. If some other brand had sufficient mass, then maybe everyone in my crowd would be a Camel smoker.
But, back to the OP, when I’d see the Wall of Cigarettes at the gas station, I dunno who was buying most of those before they went stale.
Edit: Here’s the Top 5 cigarette brands by market share:
| 1 | Marlboro | Altria | 45.8% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Newport | BAT | 12.7% |
| 3 | Camel | BAT | 7.9% |
| 4 | Natural American Spirit | BAT | 4.4% |
| 5 | Pall Mall | BAT | 3.8% |
Thought this was a thread on choosing barbecue equipment. I’ll show myself out…
Hehe. Is that Big Green Egg on your face?
Sorry…
When I was a smoker I changed my regular brand several times. Oddly enough, thinking back, I can’t recall what the compelling reason was behind any of the choices. Nor why I decided to change at all. But I would smoke the same one for years at a time.
I smoked from the mid-70s to the early 80s, starting in high school.
The mainstream popular brands at the time (at least locally) were Camel filters and Marlboro, and on the menthol side Kools. I learned almost immediately that I didn’t like Marlboros very much.
I seem to have a built-in instinct towards being different for the sake of not being like everyone else. Also, it makes it easier to recognize which of several packs laying on several table tops is yours. I tried a few variants and settled on Viceroy.
Towards the end of my smoking years, my attitude was “well if I’m addicted may as well try to really enjoy it as much as I can”, but there wasn’t much there to find. The problem with nicotine addiction is that you don’t get a nicotine buzz, there’s nothing pleasant happening when you smoke, it’s just that you don’t like the way if feels if you don’t smoke.
When I was about 13 or so, the bigger kids I sometimes hung around with smoked Newports so that’s what I was exposed to first. Plus, I grew up in Rhode Island, so it was cool to have a cigarette brand named after one of our cities. I smoked those all through high school. In my 20’s I thought it might be easier to get the monkey off my back if I started smoking a lower nicotine brand (Newport at the time did not offer a “light” version) and settled on Merits. I smoked those for years and eventually moved on to the “ultra-light” version and then finally quit. A few years later I foolishly fell victim to the addiction again and decided that Camel Lights were going to be my new go-to coffin nails. Not sure why; maybe because they were a little more unique than Marlboros, but still widely available. I dropped the whole thing a decade or so ago, and will not go back. It was fun while it lasted.
Same here. Off to the ‘Misinterpreted Thread Titles’ thread…
I can’t really answer the question, but I can mention that my late wife smoked Virginia Slim Ultra Light Menthol 100s (or some such name). If she asked me to pick up a carton at the store, I’d better not bring back Virginia Slim Light Menthol 100s, even if she had no other cigarettes. If I did, the carton would just sit around unopened and she would be out the door to hit a store or two 20 miles away. Her preference/brand loyalty was impressive.
I have never smoked, but as with many products that are similar to their competitors, I would imagine it mostly breaks down to marketing. Do I see myself as a rugged, outdoor cowboy-type? Do I like auto racing, and if so, what kind? Am I a sophisticated and liberated woman? Do I value flavor? Should I choose the brand that promises to kill me slower? As a Communications professor of mine used to say, advertising is not about selling the steak, it’s selling the sizzle.
Nice one!
Have never been a regular smoker but on occasion in university would buy a pack of Gauloises or Sobranie Black Russians (black paper, gold tsarist crest printed on it, gold filter tip) because, cool. May also have carried a copy of something by Camus, too. 
I think I started off smoking Marlboro because they were Marlboro and everybody knows Marlboro. But it’s also possible I started off smoking Camel because that’s what my dad smoked and I stole his cigs.
But anyway, I worked in a restaurant with my mom’s cousin and I was out smoking with him one day and I must have had a cough because he said I should switch to Winston because it won’t give me a cough. And I did, and I smoked Winstons forever until I quit.
When I started up again I chose Marlboro 72’s because they’re short and I was like “hey I can just smoke less!” 
I’m currently in the process of quitting Marlboro 72’s.
When I actually started buying my own cigarettes (snuck them from my parents before that), I started with Marlboros. Camel did a large amount of marketing around the time I was graduating high school, including giving away free packs of cigarettes at clubs, so I smoked those for awhile. When I was in college and pretty near broke most of the time, I smoked Magna, Quality Smokes, and GPC Approved Full Flavor. After I graduated I smoked filterless Camels, then filterless Lucky Strikes, then Lucky Strikes with filters, then back to Marlboro. Then I was in a band with a guy who smoked American Spirits. His cigarettes lasted longer than mine did. A lot longer, as in I could easily smoke two cigarettes in the time it took him to smoke one. At the time, they were pretty much the same price as Marlboros, so I switched to them to maximize my smoke break time. I do actually smoke fewer of them.
So, I have the brand loyalty of a bonobo when it comes to cigarettes. Oh well, I’ll make another effort to quit soon and hopefully the whole thing will be moot.
Weirdly, I don’t know if that type of marketing ever really factored in. Now, I’m not saying that NO marketing worked or we were too smart for that – stuff like free packs helped and I knew people who smoked Camels just for the Camel Cash to get t-shirts and shit – but smoking Marlboros to be like a rugged lone cowboy was like drinking Coca-Cola to be a rugged lone cowboy. Especially when the 18 year old girl next to you at the party with a bottle of Boones Farm was also smoking Marlboro Lights. People primarily ran with the brand they started with and you started by bumming smokes off someone else.
A couple people mentioned picking a minor brand for the sake of uniqueness and we’d play around with that now and then. Buying a pack of Honey Bees just to be the weirdo with the black & yellow pack of honey-toasted cigarettes. But if it wasn’t a “novelty” brand, I mainly just felt like I was smoking a crappier version of my usual cigarettes. There wasn’t any risk of me saying “Damn, Pall Malls, where you been all my life?”
Senior year in High School. Smoking had always been cool for teenagers. Worse still, for the previous three years I’d been watching the scenes in A Hard Day’s Night with closeups of Ringo drumming, easygoing smile with cigarette hanging out of mouth, in a cloud of backlit smoke, and THAT’S who I wanted to be!
Marlboro was the brand for the guys in my school but I’ve never liked the color red so green package Marlboro Menthol became my smoke of choice. For about a year and a half I was pack a day, then realized it wasn’t as pleasant as it had once been so I quit. Never smoked again.* That was 56 years ago.
(* Well, nicotine anyway. Smoked a lot of boo for the next 15 years before quitting that as well.)
TL/DR: Marlboro Menthol
Oh for god’s sake: HELP!, not Hard Day’s Night.
In my experience, if you start young, which most smokers do, then you’re very much influenced by what your friends smoke, vastly more than any parent figure.
You might try 2-3 different brands before you settle on one, but once you’re settled, you’re pretty much done. You’ll be sharing around cigarettes with friends, so it makes sense to smoke the same as everyone around you. And as you get used to one brand, strange brands just don’t taste very nice or might feel too harsh on the throat. I mean, let’s face it, cigarettes taste objectively disgusting, but you’ve trained yourself to accept one flavour as good but not others.
Then at some point, you think you should really dial back on the dosage, so you might drop from Marlboro Gold to Marlboro Silver, or from Camel Blue to Camel Silver, and once you’ve dropped down a peg, you can’t go back up because the stronger ones are less tolerable on the throat. Bit like making a conscious move to drink weaker coffee then finding strong coffee too much.