|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
 |
Icon of the month: DasaniThis article was first publlished in Third Way in June 2004.
Here's a deliciously refreshing story. Enjoy. Coca Cola launches a new bottled water in the UK. Just when we're ready to be drenched in saturation marketing and for another portion of the national alimentary canal to be effortlessly colonised, it emerges Coke are selling us back our own tap water at a 316,567% mark up. And not Coniston or Snowdonia tap water either, but Sidcup. Coke explains the water is purified by a "NASA-approved reverse osmosis multi-barrier filtration system". Thames Water replies that it wasn't dirty in the first place. Doubtless Coke will weather this storm in a paper cup, until it turns out that the purification process makes the water carcinogenic. Dasani goes back in the tap. Even those of us who are partial to the odd can of brown gassy sugar water delight to see Coke fall flat like this. Why? For one thing, it's a blow for a superpower, a glimpse of clay feet in a global empire that engulfs and sometimes pollutes the landscape. Coca Cola may be omnipresent, but it is not quite omnipotent after all. The Sidcup factor is particularly tasty, being a failure of Coke's WMD: marketing. Like Nike, Coke's primary product is a brand image rather than anything you can put in a shopping bag. It has spent most of its history directing all energies towards increasing sales of a single unchanging commodity. But the Dasani debacle happened because marketeers failed to realise that the British assume bottled water comes from idyllic mountain springs, not Kent factories. (Even the blue plastic looked unnatural.) In the US, where bottled water now outsells every kind of drink other than soda, Dasani comes second only to Pepsi's Aquafina, also purified. Americans are happy to pay someone else to filter their tapwater. Coke UK failed to spell out the distinction, leaving a certain high street rival to shop them. Doubtless there is also something rather British in enjoying any failure of the inordinately successful, the attitude that turns "What goes up must come down" from an observation into a creed. In fact, with $5.2 billion profits last year, the £25 million that Coke lost in Sidcup is barely a hiccup - a discrete gassy belch, perhaps. Dasani is only a symptom of Coke's deeper problems. Like Rome, empires of conquest face the challenge of what to do when there's nowhere left to conquer. Coke's answer is to diversify, creating 11 varieties of Coke as well as 300 non-cola drinks, quietly dropping the slogan 'Coke is it': the singular no longer applies. This tendency is magnified by the McFruit Salad factor. With 60 million Americans obese, the junk giants are having to cope with a new taste for food and drink that isn't bad for you. It's on such new ground that experts trip. What is Dasani then? Health product? New generation soft drink? Lifestyle accessory for the young and lean? The answer is, it's water in a plastic bottle. It's humankind's most freely available resource after air, packaged and sold for more per volume than Americans pay for petrol. The ads we never saw drip with purity and health, freshness and refreshment - what all (bromide-free) water already offers, for 0.03p a litre. Until Nestlé start marketing air (with that refreshing outdoors flavour), Dasani is the apotheosis of our insane thirst to be sold what we already have, to buy image and packaging, to spend money for that which is not bread, and labour for that which does not satisfy. It is also the product of 21st-century paranoia. Everything is bad for you. Food, drink, air (save us Nestlé), water - either it's naturally heartstopping and carcinogenic, or lethally polluted. California's recent scare over alarming levels of dihydrogen monoxide (H2O) made hilarious news, but in truth hydrophobia is a $8.3 billion industry. The deepest tragedy is that westerners are alienated from creation. We buy health in a bottle of water because we are dying from a reluctance to walk. We can see the elements only as health threats or merchandise. "Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and you that have no money." |
it's humankind's most freely available resource after air, packaged and sold for more per volume than Americans pay for petrol |
|||
