Pay more for what you already have at home
Bottled water: is it healthier, or merely marketing genius
ABU DHABI // It falls from the sky, is trapped in dams and aquifers, and runs out of our taps – and yet we still insist on paying for it at the local Baqala.
Not only that, we import it from all round the world.
Bottled water is about to take over from carbonated soft drinks as America’s No 1 beverage, with a market worth US$13 billion in 2014 – and it’s all about the marketing. “How do you convince consumers to buy something that is essentially the same as a far cheaper and more easily accessible alternative?” asked Peter Gleick, founder of The Pacific Institute, in Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind our Obsession with Bottled Water.
“You promote perceived advantages of your product, and you emphasise the flaws in your competitors’ product. This means selling safety, style and convenience, and playing on consumers’ fears of sickness and invisible contamination.”
Bottled mineral water and boutique water from abroad are hailed by their makers for health benefits, few of which have been proven.
And it can cost between 240 to 10,000 times as much as the water from our taps – depending on brand and source – which has already been ruled fit for human consumption.
The Melia Dubai hotel had its own menu for international water, and Nestle’s international relations director Clement Vachon goes as far as to say: “We take our inspiration from Louis Vuitton and Chateau Margaux.” Supermarkets have also jumped on the willingness of consumers to pay more for what they already have at home.
LuLu hypermarkets offer 22 brands, local and from as far afield as Norway and France.
As advertising goes, PepsiCo’s 2001 commercial plugging its bottled water, Aquafina, voiced by kooky Friends actress Lisa Kudrow, was refreshingly honest. “Aquafina,” went the pay-off line, was “so pure, we promise nothing”.
Nothing, other than plain old tap water mixed with a few minerals and decanted into a slickly labelled plastic bottle, was precisely what you got – and, with brands including Aquafina, rival Coca-Cola’s Arwa and Nestle’s Pure Life, among others, what you still get.
Despite the evocative scenery on the label, Aquafina, like 40 per cent of all bottled water, comes from public water supplies.
“Sure,” noted a US editorial in Advertising Age in 2001, “their tap water is ‘purified’ by a common reverse-osmosis process. But it purifies what is already free of anything the Environmental Protection Agency and the states believe is harmful.”
Somehow, though, the public had come to associate bottled water with health and, “if you were PepsiCo, wouldn’t you give the suckers what they want?”
For the past 15 years, the suckers have been lapping it up in ever greater volumes. Throughout the developed world, tap water has never been more available, palatable and reliable, yet year-on-year sales of bottled water are increasing.
Astonishingly, some time this year bottled water is expected to overtake carbonated soft drinks as the No 1 beverage inAmerica. According to the International Bottled Water Association ( IBWA), which represents US and international bottlers, distributors and suppliers, in 2015 Americans bought 44.2 billion litres of the stuff – up 7.6 per cent from 2014 and equal to more than 136 litres a person.
It is a similar story around the world: in 2014 more than 282 billion litres of bottled water were sold globally and sales are increasing by 10 per cent every year.
So how did we fall for what author Elizabeth Royte described as an “unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the 20th and 21st centuries”?
In her 2008 book, Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why we Bought it, Royte laid at least part of the blame on the consumer. Bottled water might cost vastly more than tap – anything from 240 to 10,000 times as much, depending on brand and source – but the sheer convenience of the bottled variety, she wrote, played into “our ever-growing laziness and impatience”.
The man credited with first tapping into that was Gustave Leven, who in 1947 snapped up the assets of a failed former spa and spring- water company in Vergeze, a small village in the south of France.
In the words of the history of Perrier by global food giant Nestle, which took over the company in 1992, Leven “came across the abandoned spring and concluded that if the people of Vergeze could sell a natural mineral water for three times the price of a bottle of wine, then the company must have remarkable potential”. In the mid- 1970s, Leven launched a marketing assault on the US and, thanks to a series of commercials voiced by the actor Orson Welles, created an entirely new global product market virtually overnight. It was not long before big hitters such as Nestle, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo had cottoned on to an astonishing commercial truth. Perrier was one thing, but it turned out that, given the right packaging and advertising, people were prepared to pay good money for the stuff that, in many cases, they already got for nothing from the taps in their homes.
Perrier is still available in the US, of course, but today it is a tiny player in a market dominated by non-sparkling, US-produced water. This accounts for 96 per cent of bottled water sales in the US – a market worth more than US$13 billion ( Dh47.74bn) in 2014, up from US$6bn in 2000. And it has taken more than voice- overs by beloved sitcom stars to pull this off. Fear has also played a part.
“How do you convince consumers to buy something that is essentially the same as a far cheaper and more easily accessible alternative?” asked Peter Gleick, water expert and founder of The Pacific Institute, in Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind our Obsession with Bottled Water. “You promote perceived advantages of your product, and you emphasise the flaws in your competitors’ product.”
For bottlers “this means selling safety, style and convenience, and playing on consumer’s fears of sickness and of invisible contamination”.
To achieve this, the multinationals behind the bottled-water industry have adopted and adapted the PR playbook written by industries such as tobacco, oil and sugar, hiring academic mouthpieces and setting up supposedly independent, non-profit organisations to generate and peddle information harmful to tap water, its greatest rival.
The industry long ago declared war on tap water, a war of disinformation it appears to be winning around the world. Tap water, declared PepsiCo’s vice-chair in 2000, was the company’s “biggest enemy”, a sentiment echoed that same year by the head of the Gatorade manufacturer.
“When we’re done,” Susan Wellington reportedly told analysts, “tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes”.
The Drinking Water Research Foundation (DWRF), the IBWA, the Natural Hydration Council, the Bottle Water Benefits Task Force, Bottled Water Matters are all, some more transparently so than others, front organisations for the industry. The DWRF purports to be “an independent, not- for- profit foundation” whose mission is “to provide education to the public regarding drinking water quality, production and delivery”. In fact, the organisation was set up in 1984 by members of the bottled and home water filter industries. Its current chair is Jack West, also chair of the Puro Filter Company. Various industry big names are on its board of trustees, including Nestle. Mr West has written a number of “expert view” articles for the organisation, including one stressing the dangers of coliform bacteria in drinking water and another claiming that “lead contamination poses a serious threat to the safety of our nation’s drinking water”.
Mr West failed to respond to questions about how the DWRF was funded, whether its academic spokespeople were paid and if its work could be characterised as scaremongering to persuade consumers to reject tap water.
One academic expert hired by the DWRF is Stephen Edberg, professor of laboratory medicine, internal medicine and chemical engineering at Yale University and director of the clinical microbiology laboratory at the Yale-New Haven Hospital.
In a recent article posted on the DWRF website, he wrote that moves in some US states to ban bottled water in favour of tap revealed “an underlying assumption that there are no health or safety differences between tap and bottled”. But “the facts”, he wrote, “tell another story – tap water has the benefit of not requiring a bottle but has challenges when it comes to delivering assured quality”.
Key words and phrases leapt out of the ensuing article, including “carcinogenic”, “birth defects”, “sewage contamination” and “acute gastrointestinal illness”. Prof Edberg did not respond to requests for an interview.
Since 2001 the IBWA’s own advertising code has stated clearly that “bottled water advertising should not exploit consumer fears about the safety of public drinking water supplies”, but undermining public confidence in public water supplies has clearly played a part in the industry’s success, campaigners say.
“For decades, the bottled water industry has spent millions on marketing aimed at convincing people that the only place they can get safe, clean water is from a bottle, at an immense markup,” said Lauren DeRusha, organiser of Corporate Accountability International’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign. Sometimes, this has backfired. In 2006 LA-based company Fiji Water – whose “natural artesian water” is shipped from the South Pacific island of Viti Levu – ran an advert that proclaimed “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland”.
It was “only a joke”, Fiji president Edward Cochran said later, and “we had to pick some town”, but they picked the wrong one.
Tests ordered by Cleveland’s water commissioner found Fiji bottled water contained 6.31 micrograms of arsenic per litre. While this was within the 10 micrograms allowed by the US Food and Drug Administration, Cleveland’s tap water had none.