Customers and Bottled Water: It’s the Coverup Not the Crime
Advertising Age presents Martin Lindstrom, at Coca Cola’s home in Atlanta, in his video:
Watering Down the Coke Brand?
Admitting the Source of Bottled Water
ATLANTA (BRANDFlash) — It’s surprising how just three letters — "PWS" — can generate such angst throughout an industry as large and savvy as the North American beverage business. But the issue of publicly admitting that bottled water comes from a "Public Water Source" is a huge one for marketers such as Coke. The concern, of course, is that if the consumers know those expensive bottles of water come from the same public reservoirs as tap water they’ll cease buying them. But, in fact, similar experiences in other categories show that consumers will not easily abandon products that have become as much of a habit as bottled water.
Lindstrom talks about Coke’s effort to introduce Dasani in the UK as a pure, pristine water. It’s a message that didn’t go over well when the truth came out (PWS), then took a second hit from a bottling contaminant scandal.
Lindstrom’s tone is bemused. And rightfully so. As businessmen and politicians are continually rediscovering—it’s the cover-up that hurts you, not the crime. Think Nixon. Jeff Skilling. Larry Craig. OJ. Monicagate. Rigas. Mark Foley. Corvair. Ted Haggard. Dan Rather. Bhopal. It’s endless.
And yet—as Lindstrom accurately reports, “The [marketers’] concern… is that if the consumers know those expensive bottles of water come from the same public reservoirs as tap water they’ll cease buying them.”
I know! I’ve got an idea! Let’s just shade the truth a bit. Not a flat out lie, of course. Just repositioning. Images, not words. Suggestions, hints, juxtapositions, transference, intonations. Nothing illegal. No lies, of course. After all, what do you take us for?
It is shockingly hard for most of us to just tell the truth. Maybe marketers have just a little harder time than the rest of us? Maybe their paranoia is just more publicly visible.
What’s peculiar is—as Lindstrom points out—the truth really isn’t so bad. Consumers can be quite comfortable buying PWS water. It mainly depends on—whether they’ve been told the truth about it. The whole truth. And nothing else.
If we doubt the truth of any part of a message—not just lies, but omissions, shifts, allusions, and particularly motives—then everything begins to unravel. What a tangled web we weave…
Once we doubt someone’s motives, it’s like dominoes—one statement after another gets challenged. We become cynics. And we end up not trusting the speaker.
A good case can be made for Public Water Supply water; it’s not so hard to make. And it beats the heck out of an implied fake that ends up being discovered for what it is.
A lie by any other name will smell the same. Like contaminated water.
Coke knows that they can easily lose a lot of market share if people end up finding out they can produce their own clean drinking water at home for a fraction of the cost.
Water purification companies should be stepping up the campaign to let people know this…
It’s a shame, really. It’s like the marketers sat around a table and said "what does our customer want?" "Clean", yells one person." "Fresh!" yells another. So, we have bottled water marketing that focuses on that.
In my opinion, unless you’re selling more-expensive-then-the-bottle-of-wine-that-I’ll-drink-next water, your customer isn’t that concerned about the water.
We’re buying the bottle! We’re buying the ability to carry our water around with us, put the lid back on, put it in our bag, etc. If I could do that with a water fountain, I would.
The value-add is convenience, and they don’t need to market that.
Michael Blanding has two good articles on bottled water, one about the lies of the bottled water industry, and the other about the growing backlash against bottled water.