 | ||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
| | ||||||||||||
 Hey Marketing Bestie, Us marketers sure can learn a lot from our Marketing fore-fathers and fore-mothers. The greatest marketing campaigns in history deserve to be etched in HTML stone. Welcome to Marketing Classics 411, a new kind of ancient history. In place of hieroglyphs, expect to decipher the campaigns of yesteryear. Professor Millennial teaches every Tuesday (remotely), via electronic mail. Class is now in session. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Spotify Advertising I get asked a lot where to find Gen Z. BOW DOWN How Corona Survived COVID And Kept Its CrownTemps are up. Beaches are open. Summer’s here. It’s busy season for America’s #2 imported beer (and 1 of the biggest beer brands in the entire world). But wait. How did this brand come back from sharing a name with a deadly virus that caused an unprecedented global pandemic?? No one wanted to drink La Cerveza Más Fina then… or so it was widely reported. Today’s revisionist history lesson: how a shady study did a beer brand dirty, and how the brand rose above it to stay on top. This is the story of… Corona.  Corona Extra entered the U.S. market in 1979. But the brand’s been around since 1925, when a German brewmaster named Adolph Schmedtje joined Cerveceria Modelo Sociedad Anónima, later known as Grupo Modelo.  I couldn’t find a picture of Adolph Schmedtje. Here’s his uncle Adolphus Busch, founder of Anheuser-Busch. It’s a small beer world. Americans from the Southwest and Southern California enjoyed Corona on trips to Mexico. When the brand made it stateside, Marketers got busy. They introduced the tradition of drinking Corona with a lime wedge, which took off in the U.S.  A rare pre-lime ad. They also ran some of the 1st Cinco de Mayo marketing campaigns. As Corona gained popularity, competitors and rival distributors got nasty. Rumors swirled that the beer’s distinctive golden color was the result of urine contamination. Bars pulled Corona. Consumers got spooked. In 1987, they discovered the culprits: Corona distributor Barton Beers filed a $3M defamation lawsuit against another distributor, Luce & Sons. They later settled out of court. Still, Corona triumphed. Corona Light launched in 1989 to appeal to health-conscious drinkers. 1 of my favorite commercials of all time launched in Christmas 1990. The passing of NAFTA in 1994 removed tariffs between Mexico and the U.S., leading to a surge of imported goods. And in 1998, Corona took Heineken’s spot as the top-selling imported beer in the U.S. Hindsight 2020BY 2020, Corona had been synonymous with the beach, relaxation, and the good life for decades. The brand’s “Find Your Beach” campaign launched in 2010 and reimagined the beach as a state of mind.  Corona’s job is just beach. But American drinking habits were changing, and Corona wanted to keep up with the trends. In late 2019, Constellation Brands, which owns the U.S. brand license and distribution rights for Corona and Modelo, announced a new product… Corona Hard Seltzer. It would come in 4 tropical flavors, and was calorie & sugar-conscious. It was also a $40M investment, the largest single-brand spend in Constellation’s history. 2020 was going to be Corona’s year.... Heavy is the CrownThe CDC confirmed the 1st U.S. case of the novel coronavirus on January 21, 2020. Experts weren’t sure what would happen next. Consumers and brands lived between the old normal and the new unknown. You probably remember the anxiety. All the "in these unprecedented times" commercials. Then, on February 27, 2020, Corona teased its new product on Twitter and...went viral. For all the wrong reasons.  ¿Cómo se dice "yikes" en español? Previous product launches had used similar messaging. In 2020, it didn’t land the same way. The backlash, jokes, and criticism wrote themselves.  Grudges die hard. Many consumers even assumed Corona was intentionally making light of the name it shared with the virus! The internet piled on. The ad was deleted. Just 1 day later, Corona (the beer) was back in the headlines. This time, things looked even worse. A survey had found that 38% of Americans wouldn’t buy Corona beer “under any circumstances.” CNN, CBS, Fox Business, the Today Show, and pretty much every other media outlet you can think of reported it as news. PUT IT IN PRACTICE Bad press brewing? Customer complaints making the rounds? Competitor takedown going viral? Take a deep breath and follow Corona’s playbook. Here’s your homework: 1️⃣. Consider the source. 2️⃣. Identify the problem. 3️⃣. Say less. (And don't panic.) Issuing a rushed, panicky statement when you don’t actually have a legit crisis adds fuel to the fire. Especially when the only people demanding 1 are journalists who need a story by 5pm. 1 Big Brew-hahaMarketers know the power of a statistic. For good AND evil. Research is only as reliable as its methodology and source. But many stats are shared WITHOUT context. Critical thinking and reporting take time. Many media outlets scramble to get stories up asap.  Just to be abundantly clear: This lacks context. So let’s take a closer look at this survey… It was conducted over the phone by a PR firm that happened to have several alcohol clients. Hmm. Now the methodology: 737 American beer drinkers were surveyed. Not the biggest sample size. But 38% DID say they wouldn’t purchase Corona. That's significant, right?? Wrong. In fact, it was 38% of ALL beer drinkers, including those that never drank Corona even before the pandemic. Out of the people who already bought Corona? Only 4% of them said they'd stop drinking it! The 38% stat was presented as the key takeaway in the press release. The memes already existed. Most media outlets ran with it.  The PR firm's CEO threw this quote into the release: “While [Corona] has claimed that consumers understand there’s no linkage between the virus and the beer company, this is a disaster.” The survey made Corona a top national trend on Twitter. It even became a bit on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.”  OUCH. YouGov then reported Corona beer's buzz score had decreased from 75 at the beginning of January, to 51 in February. It sure LOOKED like a disaster. Corona was caught in the crossfire of this survey headline, and widely-reported misinformation. And at least in the search data, it seemed like all the bad press was having an effect. But Constellation Brands CEO Bill Newlands only responded to the survey with 1 statement: “These claims simply do not reflect our business performance and consumer sentiment, which includes feedback from our distributor and retailer partners across the country.” Corona checked with the real customers. Then they got back to work. Hold My BeerSchools, offices, and businesses started shutting down in early March 2020. The Dow and S&P 500 suffered historic plummets. But by the end of 2020, when coronavirus disruptions had become more of a "new normal"...Constellation’s beer business was up 30%. It turned out, Corona’s biggest pandemic challenge wasn’t brand contagion from its name. The ACTUAL struggle was meeting increased demand amid factory shutdowns and supply chain struggles. Imagine if Corona had spent more time, money, and energy fighting the haters and misinformation… It could’ve poured Instead, Corona followed the real numbers: their sales. Sometimes the best thing you can do with a nothing Shortly after that 38% survey made the rounds, PRWeek, The Atlantic, and other outlets went back and debunked its credibility. As of 2025, Modelo Especial and Corona Extra are the #1 and #2 imported beer brands in the U.S. In May 2026, Kantar BrandZ’s Most Valuable Global Brands report named Corona the most valuable beer brand in the world, for the 3rd consecutive year. Corona Extra alone has been valued at $19B.  1 of Corona's commercials with Pedro Pascal in 2024. ¡Salud! THE LESSON: Tough times don’t last. Tough brands do. Especially when they know when to clap back, and when to clock in. MARKETING CHEAT SHEET (WHAT TO LEARN FROM THIS STORY): 1️⃣. Trust sales data over discourse. 2️⃣. Many "PR crises" are content, not crises. 3️⃣. The right move during a fake storm is often nothing. Sponsored by Community Text open rates are 98%. IN A MEME  Ahh, the bell has rung. Please be sure to do the reading (follow The Marketing Millennials on LinkedIn and me, Professor Millennial, on X). Off you go, passing period is only 11 minutes and there’s already a line at the vending machine that sells limes and tortilla chips. Until next time, | ||||||||||||
|
{beacon}
Workweek Newsletter
