How Does Indonesian Gen Z Relate to Nicotine?

Any discussion of changing nicotine consumption be

havior in Indonesia needs to start from market size. According to the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) Indonesia 2021, released by the Ministry of Health together with WHO in August 2024, 34.5% of Indonesian adults — around 70.2 million people — use tobacco products. That figure indicates the sheer size of the tobacco consumer base in Indonesia.

Its composition is heavily skewed by gender. GATS recorded 65.5% of adult men using tobacco products, compared with 3.3% of adult women. That gap shows gender is a major differentiator in Indonesia's tobacco consumption patterns.

The e-cigarette category grew over the same period. GATS recorded e-cigarette use among adults rising from 0.3% in 2011 to 3% in 2021. This figure is often used to argue that vaping is growing fast. A different source offers a much lower figure, though its survey base differs. According to Databoks' processing of Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data, in 2025, 1.22% of the population aged 15 and above used e-cigarettes, while 28.68% smoked tobacco. BPS's definition of tobacco smoking covers white cigarettes, kretek (clove cigarettes), cigars, lisong, pipes, shisha, and heated tobacco products.

These two sources use different methodologies and definitions, so their figures function as two separate snapshots rather than points on a single time series. Even so, both point to the same market conclusion: a mass shift from conventional cigarettes to e-cigarettes has not occurred in Indonesia. Conventional cigarettes remain the market's base, even as the number of available nicotine formats grows.

If the market is not simply migrating from one product to another, a more useful question is how the youngest generation enters this ecosystem in the first place.

Exposure to nicotine can form long before someone reaches the legal age. The Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) Indonesia 2019 recorded 19.2% of students aged 13 to 15 as current tobacco users — meaning they used smoked and/or chewed tobacco products in the past 30 days. Within the same age group, 18.8% were classified as current tobacco smokers. These two figures are each calculated across all students aged 13 to 15 and are not a part-to-whole relationship. A total of 40.6% had used a tobacco product at least once. A Ministry of Health release states that the figure for this age group rose from 18.3% in 2016 to 19.2% in 2019. The 2016 comparison figure does not appear in WHO's official GYTS factsheet, so this comparison should be read as a claim made in the ministry's release rather than an official GYTS time series. The 2023 Indonesia Health Survey, as cited in a Ministry of Health release dated 29 May 2024, recorded a smoking prevalence of 7.4% among the population aged 10 to 18.

What matters more for marketers is where that initial information comes from. In GYTS 2019, 41.5% of students learned about e-cigarette advertising from friends, and 15.7% learned about it online. For conventional cigarettes, 60.9% reported seeing advertising or promotion in outdoor spaces, and 36.2% saw it online and on social media.

This set of figures shows a consistent pattern. Exposure to nicotine comes first through social environments and public spaces, while brand communication operates at a later layer. Friends, hangout spots, and visual traffic on the street function as the first points of contact — all of them outside a brand's direct control.

The next question follows naturally: what gives the social environment that much pulling power?

A number of studies on smoking behavior among Indonesian adolescents have found that peer factors are associated with smoking intention and initiation. Other findings show that parental smoking habits are associated with a tendency to start at a younger age. It should be stressed that findings like these are associative and do not prove causation, but their direction is consistent enough to inform how we read consumer behavior.

This pattern makes sense once we stop reading cigarettes purely as a product consumed alone. In everyday practice, a cigarette functions as a social object. It creates a reason to step outside together, opens conversation with someone not yet familiar, marks a break from work, and affirms membership in a group. The sequence runs from connection, to ritual, to a sense of belonging, to identity.

The implication matters for how we read the consumer journey. The first consumption decision often unfolds as a social event, with minimal product consideration involved. Individual habits form afterward. A brand then interacts with a social practice that has already shaped how a person recognizes and makes sense of the category.

If the entry point is this social and gradual, the smoker/non-smoker binary becomes too blunt a category for reading young consumers.

IDN Research Institute has built the following framework as a tool for reading the consumer journey. This framework is conceptual and does not derive from any official WHO or Ministry of Health classification.

The six positions we use are:

This lens changes the research question. Someone can move from social user to routine user because of a change in their work environment, then move back once that environment changes again. The label "Gen Z smoker" contains at least four different consumer types, each with different motivations, frequencies, and sensitivities to communication.

Two supporting factors need to be read alongside this spectrum. First, health awareness and behavior change run on separate tracks. A person can watch their diet, exercise regularly, follow conversations about mental health, and still smoke in specific social situations. For marketers, this means high awareness of risk does not automatically move a consumer into the rejector position. Second, gender acts as a strong differentiator. The gap between 65.5% and 3.3% in the GATS data shows that social access into this category is open differently to men and women, and that difference affects where someone sits along the spectrum.

One driver of movement along this spectrum comes from a category that is still small by market size.

Market size needs to be established first. BPS data as processed by Databoks recorded e-cigarette user prevalence at 1.22% in 2025. Prevalence was higher in urban areas, at 1.38%, than in rural areas, at 0.98%.

At that small a penetration, vaping is not yet a mass replacement for conventional cigarettes. What this category brings into the nicotine ecosystem is something else: product formats, attributes, consumption contexts, communities, and vocabulary.

The difference becomes clear when the attributes of the two categories are placed side by side:

Conventional cigarettes are talked about through habit and social role. E-cigarettes are talked about through devices, flavor variants, design, technical specifications, and their user communities. The second vocabulary has far more overlap with how Gen Z already talks about other products they consume, from sneakers to coffee.

A boundary needs to be marked here. Even though vape penetration is still relatively small, the category carries more visual, experiential, and community-based elements that make it interesting to read from a consumer-culture perspective. That statement applies at the level of category attributes. It does not mean every vape user experiences the product as a lifestyle marker, nor does it prove that its cultural influence exceeds that of conventional cigarettes.

If this category carries more cultural elements, the next step is to trace where those elements circulate.

A global review of 32 studies with more than 274,000 participants aged 9 to 25 found an association between exposure to tobacco-related content on social media and tobacco product use. A study in Indonesia with 1,600 respondents aged 15 to 24 found a pattern pointing the same way. That survey was school-based and conducted online in Jakarta, the Special Region of Yogyakarta, and East Kalimantan — three provinces with the highest e-cigarette prevalence — so its figures are not nationally representative. Again, these findings show a statistical association and do not claim that social media causes someone to start using these products.

Monitoring data from the Tobacco Enforcement and Reporting Movement (TERM) for the period May to August 2023, as cited in the Ministry of Health's 29 May 2024 release, found Instagram to be the platform with the highest number of detected tobacco promotions, at 68%, followed by Facebook at 16% and X at 14%.

To read its role, we use the following sequence as an analytical framework: content, exposure, curiosity, social validation, trial, then community. This sequence functions as a reading tool and does not describe a measured pathway for every individual.

What marketers need to note is social media's position within that sequence. Social media functions as an environment where product discovery, social interaction, and perception-forming all happen at once, with a scope far broader than an advertising channel's function. User-generated content, community documentation, and everyday conversation circulate without any media spend required. For a category with tightly regulated advertising space, this means most meaning-making happens in territory a brand has not paid for.

This dynamic has formed at a time when the commercial space for tobacco products is moving in the opposite direction.

Government Regulation No. 28 of 2024 sets out a number of provisions that touch almost every point in the consumer journey. The minimum purchase age has been raised to 21. Retail sale of single cigarette sticks is prohibited. Sales are banned within a 200-meter radius of schools and children's play areas. Sales through websites, commercial electronic applications, and social media are banned unless age verification is available. Sales to people under 21 and to pregnant women are banned. On the communication side, outdoor advertising of tobacco products is banned within a 500-meter radius of schools and children's play areas.

The Ministry of Health is also preparing standardized packaging rules for tobacco products and e-cigarettes. These provisions sit within a draft Minister of Health Regulation on Health Warnings and Information on Tobacco Products and E-Cigarettes, with packaging standardization as one of its substantive elements. According to a Ministry of Health release dated 5 June 2026, the draft was prepared as a follow-up to Government Regulation 28/2024. The two-year adjustment period granted under that regulation ended on 26 July 2026, yet as of August 2026 the ministerial regulation remained a draft and had not been enacted. Several industry associations have objected to the draft, particularly regarding trademark and intellectual property issues. GAPPRI (the Indonesian White Cigarette Manufacturers Association) argues the packaging-standardization provision exceeds the mandate of PP 28/2024, while APTI (the Indonesian Tobacco Farmers Association) has raised concerns about its impact on tobacco absorption from farmers. Objections have also come from advertising associations.

Read in sequence, these provisions operate at different layers. The age limit affects eligibility. The ban on single-stick retail sale affects the entry price point and first trial. The 200-meter radius affects distribution. The 500-meter radius for outdoor advertising affects visibility in public space — one of the most frequently reported points of contact among students in the GYTS data. The ban on digital sales without age verification affects the channel. Standardized packaging affects visual identity at the last point before consumption.

In other words, regulation operates across the entire consumer journey and does not stop at advertising restrictions. Accessibility, trial, distribution, and visual identity are all affected at once. Among all these points, packaging touches the brand asset that is hardest to replace.

In a category with tight advertising restrictions, packaging carries a large share of the work in building brand equity. It carries color, logo, typography, symbolism, and point-of-sale visibility all at once. Packaging is one of the communication assets consumers see most consistently at the point of sale.

If that space for visual differentiation narrows, a business question opens up: where will brand equity be built afterward? Several assets stand to become more relevant:

This list opens up questions rather than asserting certainty. The effect of standardized packaging rules on Indonesian consumer behavior cannot yet be measured, since the rule has not been enacted. What can be said now is that one element on this list has already surfaced repeatedly since the start of this article.

Throughout the argument above, consumption keeps appearing tied to a situation. Friends, work breaks, hangouts, and gatherings show up before any product consideration does. That pattern can be mapped:

What's interesting about this mapping is that one consumer can occupy several rows at once, with different product choices in each. A dual user, for example, might use conventional cigarettes when gathering with coworkers and vape when gaming at home. Reading them as a single consumer type would erase most of the useful information here.

For that reason, the most productive question for consumer research has already shifted — from "which product do you use?" to "when, with whom, and in what situation do you use it?"

Four points follow from the reading above.

Segmentation needs to move from demographic to behavioral.

Age and gender remain useful as an initial filter, but frequency, consumption situation, and position along the consumer journey can offer a sharper picture. Two people with identical demographic profiles can sit far apart on the behavioral spectrum, and that position shifts with their environment.

Research needs to read cultural context, not just awareness.

Knowledge of the category forms through social and digital environments. Measuring awareness alone is therefore not enough to understand how consumers discover, try, and make sense of the category.

The consumer journey needs to be read as an ecosystem.

In a category with tight communication restrictions, meaning is not formed only through channels a brand pays for. Social environment, community, content, and occasion all need to be part of how the consumer journey is mapped.

Brand equity needs to be considered beyond packaging.

As the space for visual differentiation narrows, heritage, experience, community, cultural association, and occasion become relevant assets to map — while staying within regulatory limits.

The tobacco category functions as an early case study for other tightly regulated industries, from alcoholic beverages to certain health categories. As conventional advertising channels narrow, brand relevance continues to form through social context, community, and consumption situations.

1. Nicotine market ≠ cigarette market. Conventional cigarettes remain the market's base, but formats, occasions, and consumption contexts are increasingly diverse.

2. Consumer ≠ smoker/non-smoker. To understand young consumers, their position in the consumer journey and consumption situation are more informative than a single demographic label.

3. Brand ≠ packaging. As visual communication space narrows, heritage, experience, community, cultural association, and occasion become assets that need to be mapped.

Indonesia's future nicotine market cannot be read adequately from who smokes or which product they use. What increasingly matters for marketers is understanding when consumption happens, in what social context, how its meaning is formed, and how all of that stands up against ever-increasing regulatory friction.

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