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Brand name conjures up vision that smoking is healthy--who wants to tackle this rebranding job?

TAIPEI, July 23, 2002. According to a story in yesterday's New York Times, Taiwan's tobacco and alcohol monopoly will soon be history.

On July 1 the Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation, which has ruled the roost for over a century, was reorgan-ized from a government agency to a state-owned agency, its generous tax breaks rescinded. The new company will eventually be made public in stages.

Because of these changes, a well-known name may soon cease to exist:
...the company may be forced to rename its 53-year-old flagship cigarette brand, Long Life, which commands more than 40 percent of the market, because of a proposed law forbidding any marketing claim or suggestion that cigarettes are clean, safe or healthy.
How this change will affect future relations between the man and crane pictured on the pack is uncertain.

Does a cigarette named "Long Life" hoodwink people into thinking that they will live longer if they smoke it? The company warns that changing the name will severely hurt business, but others point out that young people don't smoke Long Life, only "middle-aged and older men." This buttresses an age-old chestnut: teenagers perceive themselves as immortal, making promises of longevity irrelevant. The forced name change may indeed have the unintended consequence of broadening the brand's appeal.

The arguments may well be moot, because in Taiwan, abstinence doesn't necessarily make you any safer from the lethal effects of cigarettes:
On Feb. 27, 1947, an agent of the monopoly bureau beat up a woman selling cigarettes on the street in Taipei. Local residents staged a large protest the next day, and were machine-gunned by Nationalist troops.

The incident touched off rioting across Taiwan that was bloodily suppressed with the loss of as many as 20,000 lives, mainly among Taiwan's social and intellectual elite, engendering decades of hostility between Nationalists from the mainland and many local Taiwanese.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em.