Steve Connor: Big Tobacco's big fear is a brand-free packaging law

The next big battle for the tobacco industry – some might say the final battle – will be waged around the issue of legislation that forces their cancer-causing products into plain cigarette packets that are free of company logos and branding.

Tobacco advertising and promotion has been progressively curbed over the past few decades, which has led to greater emphasis on the fag packet. With no advertising on television, billboards, magazines, sporting events and, from next year, shop displays, the cigarette packet itself has become the only place where companies can freely advertise their brands.

Tobacco companies have until now successfully fought off attempts at introducing legislation that forces them to abandon the distinctive colours, brand imagery, corporate logos and trademarks that distinguish one cigarette packet from another.

However, mounting scientific evidence suggests that packet branding could be an important and possibly decisive factor that leads teenagers to take up the smoking habit. Health experts believe that banning branded packets may help to prevent many young people from becoming addicted to tobacco, an addiction that often stays with them for life. The idea is that all cigarette packets would be of a standard shape and design, with a plain, dull colour. Health warnings would still be in vivid imagery, but the brand name itself would be printed in a simple, plain typeface.

Gone would be the distinctive red chevrons of Marlboro – the world's most popular cigarette – the quirky dromedary on a packet of Camel or the female-friendly blacks and pinks of packs designed to look like make-up cases. As one internal Philip Morris document admitted, "once exposed to innovative [packaging] especially young adults see their current packaging as dated and boring".

Another tobacco industry employee noted in an internal document released in 2007: "If you smoke, a cigarette pack is one of the few things you use regularly that makes a statement about you. A cigarette pack is the only thing you take out of your pocket 20 times a day and lay out for everyone to see." The fear that branded packets will be banned is one of the prime motivations behind the tobacco industry's use of freedom-of-information legislation to gain access to scientific and health data held by universities and government departments.

They have used the same tactic in Australia, which is on track for being the first country in the world to introduce legislation on plain packaging.

In Britain, Philip Morris International has targeted Stirling University's research on teenagers' attitudes to smoking.

The tobacco industry had no intention of letting the research on plain packaging go ahead. It would mean an end to the brand distinction that keeps them in business. They claim they have no interest in attracting new customers, only in enticing existing adult smokers into switching brands. In reality, branded packaging stimulates interest in cigarettes from non-smokers, particularly the young, particularly children.