I had a talk with my girlfriend, who smokes maybe two or three cloves a month, and loves the occasional trip to the hookah bar.
I think some of the mindset block is that they're 'fake cigarettes.' She has an aversion to anything fake-- she's flat allergic to aspertane, i.e. fake sugar. She hates low fat ice cream, low fat anything really, for example though she can't taste the difference unless you tell her, if something is buttered using margerine rather than real salted butter, she will not eat it. She avoids processed food of any variety (Prego is the devil in her estimation), and as a general rule will not eat anything with artificial flavoring in it. Heck, she will only drink organic milk-- she swears she can tell a difference between the organic and the regular kind (and I've seen her pick it out in taste tests too).
So to her, vaping is just a fake cigarette.
So I don't think that the e-cigarette, with all it's gadgetry and artificial processes is going to appeal to people like her, you know, the kind that generally eat mostly organic food and are concerned with how it's grown and eschew processed anything. I think that's the reaction Rachael Ray had, where to her the idea of vaporizing a chemical solution of ingredients she never heard of, and whose use she's unfamiliar with, sounded equally disgusting as smoking a bunch of tar-and-soot smoke from old fashioned tobacco. Tobacco is at least a plant, as opposed to something artificially mixed.
PG, VG, artificial flavorings, or even natural flavorings-- this is all chemical mumbo jumbo, and people have an aversion to this stuff based on the aversion they've been taught to have to processed foods and chemical mumbo jumbo when it comes to their food ingredients. Think about it this way: a lot of people, even those who aren't allergic, resist the idea of a diet soda. It tastes different, and they prefer the real sugar-- even if it is making them fatter and giving them sugar highs. Similarly, if I were to tell you that I had found a way to make potato chips healthier, low in fat and calories with even better taste using a better chemical process-- the first question you'd have for me is if these potato chips would give you .... leakage, because you're familiar with the Olean debacle. We are taught to inherently distrust any artificial process in our food, or anything we ingest for that matter-- many people even take issue with artificially derived pharmecutical drugs. There are people who think aspirin is poison, and let's not even get started about the use of proscribed drugs to treat mental illness.
More in talking with her about it, she figures if you're going to smoke, at least smoke real cigarettes, even if it might kill you. She feels the same way about eating on low cholesterol diets or other diets designed to maintain cardiovascular health, which I suppose is ok for her 'cause she's skinny as a rail no matter what she eats. She feels the same way about drinking-- if you're going to drink, drink.
From this aspect, I think electronic cigarettes are never really going to appeal to that sub-set of smokers who have just decided they'll smoke until they die, even if it kills them, because that's the macho way of living or whatever. To them, it's just some fancy goo-gaw pansy way around the issue of quitting-- if you're going to quit, you should just flat quit. If you're going to smoke, you should be tough enough to accept the risk and not worry about it. I don't think you'll ever crack that mindset. That there's some third-way middle ground isn't ever going to appeal to people who see things so black and white.
Finally, another mindset I've encountered is the mindset that says addiction is dangerous, no matter what form it takes. This comes up primarily as an aversion to nicotine. Nicotine is the devil-- for decades now, it's been actively demonized as the addictive agent in deadly tobacco. Nicotine and tobacco are nearly synonymous. Never mind that there aren't many long-term studies at all about the effects of using nicotine in a manner that eschews tobacco use. The use of the patch, and of nicotine gum, have only been around maybe 15 or 20 years-- and both are designed to eventually wean you off nicotine, because there is that mindset that nicotine is part of what makes tobacco deadly, therefore it too must be bad.
The truth is that there isn't much data on sustained human use of nicotine without tobacco products.. and such studies will not be readily available in our lifetime, for starters because we're unlikely to find nicotine patch or gum users who maintain a steady, daily dose, for any sustained period, and much less likely to find sustained use of Personal Vaporizer users who have been at it for 10-15 years (even the earliest vapers wouldn't crack the 10 year mark). I'm not saying Nicotine by itself isn't potentially dangerous-- other stimulants certainly are (for example, caffeine...) I'm just saying that there isn't a whole lot of medical fact out there, because nicotine use has until the past decade or so been so strongly tied to tobacco use.
That's not exactly a helpful case to those who think that if something isn't proven safe by the experts, then you shouldn't do it. These are people who will never enter a drug trial unless their life depends on it, never have an experimental procedure done if there's an approved alternative, or use pharmaceutical drugs that are proven to work in foreign countries for an illness they have because the FDA's extended approval period is not yet closed. For the people like this, it will never be a good idea until the FDA says it is, and not a moment before. Until then, it's 'dangerous' and 'risky.'
You're just not going to get through to these groups.
The best you can do in evangelizing the process is to talk about your personal experience-- and show off how cool it looks.
I converted once I had seen some friends with PVs' that didn't look bulky and ......ed in my opinion, but actually looked kind of stylish. The less PV's look like dorky gadgets, and more they look like stylish fashion accessories, the more willing people will be to adapt. Now, people approach me about the PV, and then I can tell them my personal experience and what I know about the risks and benefits involved. I can tell them about what PG is ("the same stuff that they use in those theater fog machines or at night clubs") and VG ("sometimes used as a cooking ingredient") and the flavoring ("Same flavoring they use for food products"), and that makes it sound less scary than "Chemical mixture of blah blah blah." I can engage them in a conversation about the risks, and what medical studies have been done, and the results, because I was sure be informed before I ever tried vapeing. Two of my friends already converted; a third is looking to soon. This considering that a handful of friends had converted before me, which is how I determined it looked neat. They converted because they ran across a mall cart, and were all trying to quit smoking before going to a big social event where there would be a lot of smokers (and hence temptation to smoke).
So ultimately, vaping and marketing is slowly working, and I'm a prime example, a convert by word of mouth based on mall marketing. There will likely be hold outs, but at some point we'll reach critical mass and then we'll have the media attention to get free PR to spread further. It's not an instant kind of conversion thing, but as it becomes more widespread it will also be more respected, and the easy arguments even easier to knock down.
