• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, March 3, 2020

I’m guessing the word Corona brings many things to your mind right now -- and a glass full of a ice-cold beer may not be one of them. A brand that once made us think of warm, sunny beaches and Mexican vacations on the Mayan Riviera now is mentally linked to a global health crisis. Sometimes the branding gods smile on you in their serendipity, and sometimes they piss in your cornflakes. For Grupo Modelo, the makers of Corona beer, the latter is most definitely the case.

As MediaPost Editor Joe Mandese highlighted in a post last week, almost 40% of American beer drinkers in a recent poll would not buy Corona under any circumstances. Fifteen percent of regular Corona drinkers would no longer order it in public. No matter how you slice those numbers, that does not bode well for the U.S.’s top-selling imported drink.

It remains to be seen what effect the emerging pandemic will have on the almost 100-year-old brand. Obviously, Grupo Modelo, the owners of the brand, are refuting that there is any permanent damage. But then, what else would you expect them to say?  There’s a lot of beer sitting on shelves around the world that is waiting to be drunk. It’s just unfortunate it has the same name as a health crisis that so far is the biggest story of this decade.

This is probably not what the marketing spin doctors at Grupo Modelo want to hear, but a similar thing happened about 40 years ago.  Here is the story of another brand whose name got linked to the biggest health tragedy of the 1980s.

In 1946 the Carlay Company of Chicago registered a trademark for a “reducing plan vitamin and mineral candy” that had been in commercial use for almost a decade. The company claimed that users of the new “vitamin” could “lose up to 10 pounds in 5 days, without dieting or exercising.” The Federal Trade Commission soon called bullshit on that claim, causing the Carlay Company to strip it from its marketing in 1944.

Marketing being marketing, it wasn’t the vitamins in this “vitamin” that allegedly caused the pounds to melt away. In the beginning, it was something that chemists call benzocaine. That’s a topical anesthetic you’ll also find it in over-the-counter products like Orajel. Basically, benzocaine numbed the tongue. The theory was that a tongue that couldn’t taste anything would be less likely to crave food.

The active ingredient was later changed to phenylpropanolamine, which was also used as a decongestant in cold medications and to control urinary incontinence in dogs. In the ‘60s and ’70s, it became a common ingredient in many diet pills. Then it was discovered to cause strokes in young women.

The Carlay Company eventually became part of the Campana Corporation, which in turn was sold to Purex. The product morphed from a vitamin to a diet candy and was sold in multiple flavors, including chocolate, chocolate mint, butterscotch and caramel. If you remember Kraft caramels — little brown cubes packaged in clear cellophane — you have a good idea what these diet candies looked like.

Despite the shaky claims and dubious ingredients, the diet candies became quite popular. I remember my mother, who had a lifelong struggle with her weight, usually had a box of them in the cupboard when I was growing up. Sale hit their peak in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. There were TV ads and celebrity endorsers -- including Bob Hope and Tyrone Power -- lined up to hawk them.

Then, in 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report about five previously healthy men who all became infected with pneumocystis pneumonia. The odd thing was that this type of pneumonia is almost never found in healthy people. There was another odd thing. All five men were gay. In 1982, the CDC gave a name to this new disease: AIDS.

Of all the ways AIDS changed our world in the 1980s, one was particularly relevant to the marketers of those diet candies, which just happened to be named Ayds.

You can see the problem.

Ayds soldiered on until 1988, despite sales that dropped 50%. The company tried to find a new name, including Diet Ayds and Aydslim in the U.K. It was too little, too late. The candies were eventually withdrawn from the market.

Does this foretell the fate of Corona beer? Perhaps not. AIDS has been part of our public consciousness for four decades. A product with a similar sounding name didn’t stand a chance. We can hope that coronavirus will not have the same longevity. And the official name of the outbreak has now been changed to Covid19. For both these reasons, Corona -- the beer -- might be able to ride out the storm caused by corona, the virus.

But you can beat that there are some pretty uncomfortable meetings being held right now in the marketing department boardroom at Grupo Modelo.