If Banham's analysis is correct, the Marlboro hard pack was certainly an innovative way of <a href="usasmokingsale.com">Newport Cigarettes</a> getting the customer's attention. In any event, Marlboro succeeded, like Coca-Cola and blue jeans, as a worldwide icon of American-ness. Emerging at a moment when American cars, houses and products were becoming increasingly elaborate, Marlboro has the stripped-down, one-size-fits-all quality characteristic of the most enduring American designs.

Marlboro has succeeded so well that it has become a symbol of all brand-name products. When the brand encountered price resistance in 1993 and sales fell 5.6 percent, not only did the stock price of its manufacturer, Philip Morris, fall but so did the stocks of virtually all other brand-name producers. Newspapers and magazines ran feature articles on the death of brands, shocked that consumers in the midst of a worldwide economic downturn should buy cheaper cigarettes as a way to save money.

The Financial World 1993 analysis of brand values suggested that obituaries were premature. Marlboro's value had slipped 6.3 percent, leaving it at about $39.5 billion, by far the most valuable brand name in the world. (Coca-Cola was next at $33.4 billion.) A very high percentage of this value must be ascribed to the relentless advertising and promotion of <a href="vonderhain.com/marlboro">Marlboro Cigarettes</a> the brand throughout the world. Some much smaller share must be <a href="usasmokingsale.com">Cheap Cigarettes</a> allocated to the cigarettes themselves. But there is little doubt that the package itself -- universally recognizable, never dated -- deserves a good deal of the credit.

It also, of course, deserves blame for helping make smoking a desirable activity and, especially outside the United <a href="usasmokingsale.com">Carton Of Cigarettes</a> States, a high-status one. If Gianninoto's design was as much a marketing triumph as it appears, it was also a public health disaster that helped induce people to smoke cigarettes who might not otherwise have done so. Everybody knows, intellectually at least, that great packages don't always hold good things. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown Co.

Photos: Old Look -- Marlboro cigarettes, in a wordier white pack, were marketed largely for women in 1927. New Look -- In 1956, the bolder red and white flip-top box was pitched to the he-man. (Photographs from Little, Brown Company)