Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.

“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” is best known as a mid-20th-century American advertising slogan for Winston cigarettes (R.J. Reynolds). It circulated widely through print, radio, and especially television commercials, becoming a catchphrase associated with mass-market cigarette branding before modern restrictions on tobacco advertising. The line is often remembered in connection with the later public controversy over its grammar (“like” vs. “as”), which helped keep the slogan in popular memory beyond the campaign itself. Because it was created and deployed as copywriting rather than a literary utterance, it is frequently attributed to “Anonymous” or to the brand rather than to an individual speaker.

The slogan aims to naturalize the product by implying there is a normative standard for what a cigarette “should” taste like—and that Winston uniquely meets it. The phrasing is deliberately colloquial (“tastes good like…”) to sound conversational and broadly American, positioning the brand as familiar and unpretentious. The prescriptive “should” also carries a subtle persuasive force: if a cigarette ought to taste this way, choosing Winston becomes the sensible, default choice. In retrospect, the line is often read less as a claim about flavor than as a snapshot of an era when tobacco marketing could openly frame smoking as ordinary, desirable, and even normative.

“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”
“Winston tastes good—like a cigarette should.”
“Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”