Marketing of bottled water
Fresh from the sea
Why is it that people would pay sometimes 500 times the price that they could get it somewhere else? The answer is through brilliant marketing which adds value to the product which is way more than just the raw product itself. This has been done with bottled water recently globally over the past 30-40 years. It is now normal for people to stock up their fridge with bottled water in places like Cape Town where the standard of the tap water is exceptionally high and is one of the cleanest in the country.
So how did this phenomena first happen? In 1977 in America a company launched bottled water called Perrier which was sold in a glass bottle. These drinks were targeted at the high end of the market as a luxury item as it was expensive and exclusive. Many celebrities were also seen drinking bottled water which added to the prestige and increased demand for the product. This was also around the time that the American people were starting to realize that the amount of soft drinks they were consuming was bad for their health and they started looking for an alternative instead. These bottled water companies centered their marketing campaign around how much cleaner and purer their water was compared to tap water because it came from a natural spring. These companies were thus using fear (of unclean tap water), which is one of man’s strongest emotions, to steer people away from tap water and towards theirs. Obviously tap water didn’t have a marketing campaign behind it to make a counterargument and thus the bottled water companies enjoyed a competition free environment. There was a problem though in that the packaging still made it too expensive for the average Joe to swop his Coke or Pepsi for a bottle of water. That changed in 1989 when a new plastic started being used to package beverages. This plastic was called PEC and it was lighter clearer and most of all, less expensive to produce. The lighter bottle allowed it to be more portable
Why is it that people would pay sometimes 500 times the price that they could get it somewhere else? The answer is through brilliant marketing which adds value to the product which is way more than just the raw product itself. This has been done with bottled water recently globally over the past 30-40 years. It is now normal for people to stock up their fridge with bottled water in places like Cape Town where the standard of the tap water is exceptionally high and is one of the cleanest in the country.
So how did this phenomena first happen? In 1977 in America a company launched bottled water called Perrier which was sold in a glass bottle. These drinks were targeted at the high end of the market as a luxury item as it was expensive and exclusive. Many celebrities were also seen drinking bottled water which added to the prestige and increased demand for the product. This was also around the time that the American people were starting to realize that the amount of soft drinks they were consuming was bad for their health and they started looking for an alternative instead. These bottled water companies centered their marketing campaign around how much cleaner and purer their water was compared to tap water because it came from a natural spring. These companies were thus using fear (of unclean tap water), which is one of man’s strongest emotions, to steer people away from tap water and towards theirs. Obviously tap water didn’t have a marketing campaign behind it to make a counterargument and thus the bottled water companies enjoyed a competition free environment. There was a problem though in that the packaging still made it too expensive for the average Joe to swop his Coke or Pepsi for a bottle of water. That changed in 1989 when a new plastic started being used to package beverages. This plastic was called PEC and it was lighter clearer and most of all, less expensive to produce. The lighter bottle allowed it to be more portable