editorial comment And that's a marketing genius....... Hum, paraphernalia does not remember anything else but ads about drugs are for losers, from Just Say No, to ugly teeth of meth users, to celebrities preaching agaisnt it. Man, no wonder AT&T, IBM anf P&G all had problems...... That was just about the shallowest piece on drugs ever written. Can you spell cliches? Must be from the same bunch who are saying that America has an "image problem" in the Middle East...

Reducing drug use in America has been the longest running, most unsuccessful marketing program in history. In my last column, I talked about "repositioning the competition." Let's apply that strategy to the so-called "drug war" in an attempt to suggest a better approach.

Millions of Americans want to consume drugs, and we've repeatedly pointed out the difficulty of trying to change people's minds.

How do you reduce the demand for drugs? The trick is to find a way to hang a very negative idea on drug use. That means a repositioning strategy is necessary.

Put on your marketing hat. You've just received a call from the president. You're to head up a new government-sponsored communications program to replace the current hodgepodge of a program, which has had little impact on reducing demand.

Obviously, some changes are called for if progress is to be made. And progress is desperately needed. After years of effort and billions of dollars spent in law enforcement, it would appear there is only one long-term way to decrease the use and sale of drugs in America: You have to find a way to decrease demand.

Decreasing supply only increases the price and profit potential for suppliers willing to take the risks. Since the product cost is so low and the return so high, experience shows that there is no effective way, outside of legalizing drugs, that will force illegal drug suppliers out of business. For every drug dealer you shut down, two will open up. So what's the strategy?

Let's start with a quick examination of the trends in substance abuse. As with any problem, you don't just focus on the product at hand. You try to get a feeling for the entire category. We call this the context of the market.

In this case, the smoking of cigarettes offers important parallels to the problem of drug consumption. Like drugs, cigarettes introduce a foreign substance into the body. They can be addictive, and it is widely accepted that they are bad for you. In fact, around 1990, they were reported to kill 50 times as many Americans as drugs do.

The main difference between cigarettes and drugs is that cigarettes are legal, as well as an important revenue source for the government. Thus, just about everyone knows that cigarettes are bad for you, yet cigarette sales, while declining, have not shown a steep decline. (Today, cigarettes kill only 45 times as many Americans as drugs do.)

It would appear that the educational approach that presents the health hazards of smoking has failed to overcome the image enhancement that cigarette companies have promised in their advertising. Eliminating cigarette advertising from the broadcast medium has hurt the industry's ability to launch new brands, but the message gets through via a wide array of media still available to cigarette advertisers.

On the basis of the cigarette lesson, you can probably surmise that if drugs continue to be perceived as "in," an educational, "bad for you" approach might not be a good tactic to dramatically reduce demand. The same can be said for the advertising industry's effort--to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars--which, for the most part, also says "bad for you" in a number of different ways.

What this examination of the cigarette experience shows you is that the traditional "top-down" approach of telling people what's bad for them rarely works. It's time to shift the battlefield.

What appears to be more of an influence on the consumption of a product is its social message. (Before World War II, for example, every star in a Hollywood movie smoked. Today few smoke on film.)

This insight offers an opportunity. Unlike cigarette manufacturers, drug producers and sellers cannot use advertising to promote a fashionable image for their drugs. On the other hand, the government can use advertising to make drugs less and less fashionable to use.

If America runs true to form, this will dramatically reduce demand. When a product is "out" in America, it doesn't sell. Now to your important decision: What concept can you use to make drugs unfashionable?

When you study the situation, one obvious repositioning strategy jumps out. It has been widely demonstrated that drug use is a one-way street: Heavy users are in danger of losing their jobs, their friends, their families, their self-esteem, their freedom and eventually their lives.

What this sets up is a simple play on words that can be a two-edged sword against the drug dealers, pointing out the bad things that drugs can do to you while presenting them in the context of a social image.

The idea: Drugs are for losers.

If the perception that "drugs are for losers" can be established, a mortal blow at demand will be struck. If America disdains anything, it's a loser. Underdogs are acceptable, but a winner is what America admires most and what everyone aspires to be.

Now it's time for you to turn your repositioning idea into a national strategy by figuring out who should deliver this message. The natural choice is to have ex-drug users or relatives of users tell their sad and moving stories. The natural medium is television, with its emotional and personal impact.

Celebrities and sports stars who have had publicized drug problems could be asked to participate in this program. Examples: Ex-baseball-star Denny McLain might talk about how he went to jail and lost his freedom, or John Belushi's wife might talk about how her husband lost his life.

At the end of every commercial, the subject would look in the camera and say, "Drugs are for losers." As more and more famous and infamous people deliver that message, America will begin to see that drugs take you down, not up.

When this happens, the demand for drugs will start to shift downward, and the drug business will become a lot less profitable. This is bound to make organized crime think twice about the risk/return ratio in the drug business.

With more than 40 years of experience in advertising and marketing, Jack Trout is the acclaimed author of many marketing classics, including Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Marketing Warfare, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Differentiate or Die, Big Brands Big Trouble, A Genie's Wisdom and his latest, Trout on Strategy. He is president of marketing consultancy Trout & Partners and has consulted for such companies as AT&T, IBM, Southwest Airlines, Merck, Procter & Gamble and others. Recognized as one of the world's foremost marketing strategists, Trout is the originator of "positioning" and other important concepts in marketing strategy.

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