HEADY BRAND.

Valentin Diez Morodo has transformed Corona from a blue-collar brew in the "wrong" package and made in a country not known for beer to the elixir of yuppies worldwide.

IT WAS A MARKETER'S DREAM SCENARIO: AFTER A LONG DAY of discussion during the recent meeting of heads of state from Latin America and Europe in Rio de Janeiro, French President Jacques Chirac retires to his hotel room in Copacabana. He wants a beer, not just any beer, but a Corona. Mon Dieu! This is Brazil, not Mexico, where's a conscientious concierge to get a case of the Mexican brew? "We had it shipped from Sao Paulo," says Valentin Diez Morodo, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Mexican brewer Grupo Modelo. "He is a very big fan of our beer."

Chirac isn't the only one. Over the past two decades, Diez Morodo has built Corona into the world's fifth-best-selling beer brand and he has done it by breaking all sorts of rules. The 59-year-old executive exports Corona in a non-traditional clear-glass bottle with a painted label at a premium price from a country--until recently--hardly associated with brewing.

"Corona's marketing has been very, very good," says Gary Hemphill, vice president of consultant Beverage Marketing Corp. in New York. "They have stayed with every turn in the market."

Many felt that the original Corona madness of the mid-1980s would fade as the fad of squeezing a lime into a working-class Mexican beer subsided. It hasn't. Shipped to 140 countries world wide, average annual growth of export volume for the past five years has been more than 30%. And in the United States, when the craze started, Corona is the number-one imported beer.

Diez Morodo is keeping his brand alive with some astute maneuvers. When competitors were passing along a roughly US$0.50 per six-pack tax to U.S. consumers at the start of the decade, he swallowed the increase and froze his prices, effectively creating a new price segment for Corona above U.S. domestic beers but below imports, especially chief rival Heineken. When he finally caught the then-market-leading Dutch brew in 1997, he thundered past with the launch of a 12pack presentation, taking a 10 million-plus-case lead with a whopping 38% growth rate in 1998. "Heineken and other European beers couldn't follow Corona because it's more expensive to ship from Europe than Mexico," says Hemphill.

Getting fresh. With its first U.S. price increase in eight years taking effect last August, Modelo is now relaunching the Corona Light brand with a new label after back-to-back years of better than 40% growth. "Modelo has been in the two big growth segments in the United States: imported and light beers:' says Greg Prince of Beverage World magazine.

The success has come despite heightened competition, even from Anheuser-Busch, a big, but not controlling, shareholder in Modelo and the world's largest brewery. The U.S. brewer and Brazilian partner Antartica rolled out Rio Crystal, a long-necked, clear-bottle beer bearing a strong resemblance to Corona, while Bud also launched a "born on" freshness campaign aimed, at least partially, at imported beers like Corona.

Denying any rift with Modelo's U.S. partner, Diez Morodo says the campaign did no damage. "Freshness is always something that we watch very carefully." he says.

Diez Morodo isn't resting on his U.S. laurels though; he's taking the same strategy that brought success north of the border to the four corners of the globe. In most countries, he has already found quality importers and begun distribution to bars and restaurants, known as been bottle" sales. In this way, he capitalizes on the boom in Mexican restaurants ("They're everywhere"), positions the brand at a premium price ("You don't have to sell cheap to sell"), and allows consumers to try his product ("If I put the product on a store shelf, nobody will pick it up").

Once he gets sufficient market buzz going, he opens up distribution to retail outlets but keeps his prices above those of domestic brews. "I never go to a country to compete with the local breweries:' Diez Morodo says.

In market after market, the strategy is bringing results, so much so that Modelo is aggressively merchandising, extending its Corona brand name to everything from key chains to towels.