The Appeal of Fizzy Stuff

The other day I saw a bottle of this increasingly-popular preparation rolling around on the desk of my boss Rich Tehrani:

I've used this stuff and love it. From all appearances, the folks who make Airborne, Airborne Health, are building a great business positioning the product as a cold-preventive remedy for people in high-risk work, such as air travel and teaching elementary school. Rich travels a lot and was sick recently, so he has good incentive to try something like this.

My wife Virginia works at Trader Joe's and has recently been bringing home this competing product:

Emergen-C (made by Alacer Corp.) seems to contain some of the same stuff as Airborne, but Airborne purportedly includes a mix of herbal additives as well.

I've been trying to fend off a cold recently, so I've been fizzing up quite a bit of Emergen-C. So far I'm holding my own and haven't regressed beyond a scratchy throat.

Does any of this stuff really work as far as preventing a cold? I don't know for sure, but I think the real appeal of these fizzy products (at least for us baby boomers) goes back to this product from the 1950s and 1960s:

If you're too young to know what Fizzies are, as our CRM columnist David Sims said recently, you may be dismissed to go play in the sandbox now.

For those of us whose formative years included the consumption of Fizzies, it's comforting to be able to lift a glass to our lips and hear once again the evocative sparkling fizz of effervescence.

AB -- 3/25/05