Monitoring tobacco industry pricing and price-reducing practices at the national, state and local levels: Policy implications for tobacco control

There is substantial and growing evidence that tobacco companies manipulate prices and use price-reducing promotions to blunt the impact of tobacco excise tax increases and to reach selected consumers in targeted geographies. Price-reducing practices now account for the vast majority of tobacco industry marketing expenditures. Three complementary papers in this session will compare and contrast methodologies for tobacco price measurement at the national, state, market, and neighborhood levels. Comparisons will be made of self-reported cigarette prices obtained in the Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS) and International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Surveys for Canada and the US (ITC) and those reported in widely used archival sources, including the Tax Burden on Tobacco and national consumer price indices. Commercially available retail scanner records will be used to display trends in tobacco pricing across U.S. states and designated market areas, showing considerable variation over time and across geographies, even among within-state market areas. These trends in scanner data will also be compared to data collected from systematic in-store observations in selected states and market areas. Finally, retail advertised prices for cigarettes will be assessed in relation to store neighborhood demographics, suggesting different patterns of local target marketing, especially for African American consumers. The session discussant will demonstrate that these findings support the need for ongoing surveillance of tobacco price and price-promotions, which may be used to monitor industry actions, inform tobacco control policy development, and evaluate the impact of policy approaches to address tobacco industry pricing practices.