12/7/2023 0 Comments Corona beer originAs a viral tweet by CNN put it, the survey supposedly found that 38 percent of Americans would not drink Corona, “ because of the coronavirus.” Because they did not understand that the original press release was walking a fine line between deeply misleading claims and outright lies, their articles have inadvertently fallen on the side of the lie. Of those Americans who did report regularly drinking Corona, only 4 percent said they would now stop drinking the beer.Ī number of major news outlets appear to have walked right into the trap. “Could one imagine walking into a bar and saying ‘Hey, can I have a Corona?’ or ‘Pass me a Corona.’”īut this connection is manufactured, and Torossian is ignoring far more mundane reasons Americans might not buy a Corona, including that they don’t like the taste. “There is no question that Corona beer is suffering because of the coronavirus,” Ronn Torossian, the CEO of 5WPR, says in the press release. Or, as The Atlantic noted of the issue:īy presenting this finding in the context of other questions that are explicitly about the coronavirus, the press release creates the impression that Americans’ reluctance to drink the beer is due to the coronavirus. But it didn't provide readers with the questions that the poll's subjects were asked, nor did it offer any context explaining why respondents answered the way they did. The PR piece stated that a phone survey of 737 American beer drinkers had determined that "38% of Americans would not buy Corona under any circumstances now," and by offering that statistic in conjunction with other information about the coronavirus, the piece again misleadingly suggested that consumers were being frightened away from Corona beer merely because of its name. However, that poll was conducted and published by the 5W public relations firm, and it did not find what many news reports gleefully claimed it did. Many of them based their articles on a survey that supposedly documented that "38% of Beer-Drinking Americans Wouldn't Buy Corona Now," again suggesting people were being scared off the brand due to mistaken associations between the name of the brand and a virus. Additionally, demand during the Chinese New Year was lower than in previous years as it coincided with the beginning of this outbreak."īut the trope that "people are so dumb they're shunning Corona beer because they think it's connected to the coronavirus" was too tempting for many news outlets to eschew, even though little or no evidence backed it up. "The outbreak has led to a significant decline in demand in China in both on-premise and in-home channels. The Belgium-based group said: "The impact of the Covid-19 virus outbreak on our business continues to evolve. The world’s biggest brewing giant, which is behind the Corona, Budweiser and Stella Artois brands, forecast first quarter earnings will tumble by about 10% after the virus outbreak saw demand slump in China as it also coincided with the Chinese New Year, sending its shares 8% lower.ĪB InBev estimates the earnings hit across China after seeing around £221 million of lost sales in the first two months of 2020 alone due to coronavirus – also known as Covid-19. However, what the text of the article actually reported was not that consumers had suddenly become "afraid" of Corona beer, but that multiple brands of beer (not just Corona) were experiencing relative sales slumps in China because the spread of the coronavirus had generally dampened public activities there, at a time of year (i.e., during Chinese New Year celebrations) when sales were typically high: Take, for example, the following article, whose headline and subhead misleadingly implied that the Corona brand had experienced a steep drop-off in sales because potential buyers were being scared off by its putative link to the coronavirus: In February 2020, as fears of a world-wide COVID-19 pandemic caused by a new coronavirus from China spread across the globe, many Western news outlets began running stories suggesting that consumers were shunning the popular Mexican brand of beer called Corona due to their mistakenly connecting it with the coronavirus.
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