Frequent branding shifts meant Ayds lacked the brand equity to survive in the 1980s Creating beliefĮvery famous brand usually has something distinctive that can trigger a powerful emotion – it’s the key to unlocking belief. And there was no consistent golden thread to hark back to its roots and history, to land much needed credibility and heritage – critical for all brands, but never more so than for a diet candy brand essentially selling hope. Its brand image often changed radically, so it lacked the requisite resonance and relevance for its audience. It had no long-standing equities to trigger an emotional response and gain affinity over the years. Despite it being in market since the 1930s, there was no established and familiar look and feel, and no consistent or compelling visual expression. The other problem was the Ayds brand image. The first lay in the fact that the product benefit of Ayds was rapid weight loss, which unfortunately was the public’s growing understanding of the AIDS virus victims’ symptoms.
Surely a brand that had been around almost 50 years would prevail over a temporary pandemic? So, where did Ayds go wrong? Building equityįundamentally, the reasons were twofold. After all, to change your brand name because of a new virus would have felt like a knee-jerk reaction. Weight loss was an unfortunate link between the Ayds brand and the AIDS diseaseĪt that time, the Ayds marketing team also held their nerve. According to The New York Times, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, sales of the diet candy Ayds dropped approximately 50% and the brand finally went out of business. It’s not the first homonym involving a disease and a brand. But in all honesty, they have good reason to be worried – Google has reported a global increase in ‘Corona beer virus’ searches. Constellation Brands, which owns the US rights to the brand, said at the end of February: “With Corona Extra sales up 5% per the latest four-week period, our beer business continues its strong performance despite unfounded claims about the impact of Covid-19 on the business and consumer sentiment.”īy countering rumours with the persuasive power of numbers, they’ve managed to shut down the gossip and carried on regardless. To date, Corona marketers have held their nerve, debunking the urban myths and defending their beleaguered brand name with substantiated stats from the get go. So, let’s get straight to the point: as a marketer, how would you play it if you were the brand manager of Corona beer? It’s not an easy situation when the brand you manage shares the same name as a global pandemic that has the world in its grip? Defending a beleaguered name And irrespective of whether the talk about consumers shunning the brand is fact or fiction, you can imagine a room of marketers at its HQ scratching their heads and thinking: “Of all the virus names you could have chosen – you chose Corona.”
Corona beer was always going to be an easy target.
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