Corona's Mexican wave
Every night in the week of August 11, giant walking Corona bottles will patrol around 50 bars in Edinburgh, and a bright yellow 'party bus' will mingle with traffic, parking up outside pubs to allow its cargo of dancing girls, magicians and DJs to spew forth.
It is all part of Corona Week, a programme of activity designed to promote the Mexican lager brand. It has already hit London and Bristol, and will move on after Edinburgh to Manchester, Newcastle and Birmingham.
Since the first Corona Week in 1998, the scheme has been central to Wells & Young's (W&Y) - which sells, markets and distributes the brewed-at-source beer in the UK - successful positioning of Corona
as a fashionable beer marketed largely around high-tempo drinking occasions. Its distribution has gone from 60,000 cases when W&Y first signed the deal to more than five million now. According to The Publican Market Report (which will be released in full on August 25), Corona is stocked by 33 per cent of pubs, and nine per cent choose it as one of the 'desert island' brands they would stock if given complete freedom.
It is activity such as Corona Week, as much as traditional advertising, that has driven this growth. Corona's current major ad campaign, 'The Beginning', is a departure. The brand has always tended to focus on below-the-line marketing and sponsorship instead.
As Angel Garcia Gomez, head of Corona in the UK, explains on the top deck of the Corona party bus, the week remains as important as ever.
"The idea was to promote licensees' venues and bring awareness of the brand at the same time," he says.
"It's still about talking to the bars and finding out what they want. These are tailor-made solutions for how the bar owner thinks he can best bring traffic into the venue."
Corona Week is actually several weeks. The run-up is spent pre-
promoting and discussing strategy with licensees and staff. It involves a lot of barstaff training, and Garcia Gomez believes this is very important. "We are making sure that the barstaff get something out of all this, talking to them, telling them what we want to achieve," he explains.
One upshot of this exercise, for example, has been a new lime cutter - lime wedges, of course, being crucial to the serve. Barstaff raised the point that it was difficult to cut the fruit into suitable sizes for wedging in the neck of the bottle.
Of course, world beers' presence in the UK on-trade has increased since Corona's emergence. The brand has a sizeable Mexican competitor in Coors' Sol, and there has been a proliferation of beer brands from Europe and beyond.
Corona has been a stalwart among them. Garcia Gomez puts the brand's hardiness down to unconventional marketing such as Corona Week. "The secret is not just to get into the bars, but to stay there," he says.
"We need the momentum to continue, to reassure our trade customers that the brand still has a lot of mileage in its legs."
