For anyone that has spent time on the streets of Southeast doing HIV/AIDS outreach through condom distribution as well information about testing sites etc- you are familiar that the condom of choice is Trojan Magnum®- for those of you that don’t know about this particular condom it is made for the “larger” gentlemen. Even though the health department provides Durex XXL® (which is the same size as a Magnum®) the trusted brand is Trojan®. The health department can’t afford to buy Magnum® in bulk as they are nearly double the price.

Most of us have heard it all from “Durex and Lifestyle pop, break. . .etc etc” so. . . Elena Lumby and myself (Jana Baldwin) Karyn Pomerantz’s groupies discovered that Trojan® is doing a Campus Comedy Tour for undergrads. We barely missed the Trojan® “van” (that distributes information among other fun things in regards to condoms) at GW, so we decided to catch them at Johns Hopkins this last Thursday.

We buckled up into Elena’s VW Yellow Bug with firebolts on the side- two white girls heading to Baltimore which we soon discovered as we were pulling out of her driveway that neither of us had ever been there before! Ha ha ha! Thank goodness for GPS!
(We thought Jordan Carlos was the most funny of all! You can check him out on Comedy Central as Steven Colbert’s “Black Friend”)

Bottom line- we made it to Hopkins found a contact- one of the marketing directors from Trojan® Corporate who told us “we have a 76% market share in the US” and Elena and I said “in the Magnum® condom we are pretty sure you have 100% with the population we work with.” She was unaware of the dire need in DC and the alarming statistics in DC- we came prepared with a letter, statistics, facts about MWPHA and Ms. Mitrano from Trojan® said that there was a large board meeting coming up next week with Trojan that she would be taking our information back to the board to discuss with them how they could partner with our community!

Even though this story was “fun” and exciting it just goes to show the power of Branding. Dr. Doug Evans, the Department Chair for the Communications and Marketing Track at the George Washington University discusses in his paper on Public Health Branding and how branding can change behavior. I think that knowing the importance of the literal behavior involved with the prevention of HIV/AIDS made me so passionate about finding a direct contact with Trojan®. Clearly the population that the Public Health Officials/Volunteers etc are serving here in DC TRUST the brand name Trojan®. The consumers believe that only with Trojan® they can expect a quality product. My other fear is that what if the consumers are just simply not using a condom if they do not have a Magnum® brand name? This is scary. . . So not only do the consumers trust the product, but since there is a very specific behavior involved with the product- prevention of HIV/AIDS, unintended pregnancy, and STD’s it was very important to try and bridge the barrier or frankly in my opinion excuses made by many- but in the same token, Trojan® has done such a good job at making the public trust them that why would you use anything else?