Word up: 'A tale of two beverages and the curious power of brands'

In the soft drinks world, it was announced by Coca-Cola that after fifty years the ‘totally tropical taste’ of Lilt was to be renamed as the somewhat more cumbersome Fanta Pineapple and Grapefruit.

Meanwhile, over in beer land, the Spanish lager Madri continues its remarkable growth as the most successful beer launch in history.

According to The Times, it has gone from nowhere to one of the top five biggest British beer brands in less than two and half years.

Lilt isn’t the first food or drink to be renamed. Older readers may remember a childhood of Marathon bars and Opal Fruits, before they were rebranded as Snickers and Starbursts.

Usually, this is about a parochial British product being consumed by a bigger, more international name.

In this case, Fanta sales were seventeen times those of Lilt when Coca Cola decided to make the switch.

Not only that, but Fanta as a brand scored higher on every metric from ‘awareness’ to ‘purchase intent’. The die-hard fans who have been buying cans for £100 on eBay are very much the exception.

If Lilt has reached the end of its brand life, Madri’s is at its beginning. And just as Lilt was created in the UK rather than the Caribbean, so Madri’s roots are apparently more British than Spanish. Although adverts claim the drink evokes ‘El Alma de Madrid’ or ‘The Soul of Madrid’, the drink is actually brewed in Tadcaster (maybe it would more accurately be called Tadri?).

This isn’t the first time its makers Molson Coors have successfully pulled off such a marketing coup: seven years ago they launched Pravha, a Czech-style lager that was ‘inspired by Prague, brewed in the UK.’

This link between a brand and the place it purportedly came from can sometimes be a bit tenuous.

Back in 2015, Foster’s were sued in the US over the fact that for all its ‘Australian for beer’ branding, it was actually made over there in Texas.

Foster’s, curiously, is the most successful Australian beer brand in the world, apart from in, well, Australia, where its sales are trounced by Victoria Bitter and Carlton Draught. It’s a bit like Lipton’s Tea – the British tea brand drunk everywhere except over here.

 In 1962, Sam Panopoulos, a Canadian restaurant owner, born in Greece, came up with the idea of putting pineapple on a pizza, thanks to his liking of Chinese sweet and savoury tastes.

This became the Hawaiian pizza, because that was where the can of pineapples he was using came from. In reality, his pizza was every bit as totally tropical as a former can of Lilt.