Water on The Brain
There are many things that would leave a visiting alien greatly confused about us humans. Traffic wardens, leg waxing, Derby City Centre on a Saturday night – our little green friend would find it all most strange. But imagine explaining that oddity known as ‘bottled water’…
“Why yes, we have clean water coming out of our taps for free, but here on Earth we prefer paying for it to be imported 16,000 kms from Fiji.”
“Does it taste better? Well, not really, but the bottle looks pretty.”
“What’s that, you ask – bad for the environment? Yes, I suppose it does require a lot of oil, energy, water and plastic to produce and, yes, most of this ends up as landfill – but haven’t you heard of ‘volcanicity’?”
But by now, our alien friend would be stocking up on duty free and packing for his return flight: no discernible intelligence on this planet he’d conclude, “Too much of this so-called ‘money’, not enough of this so-called ‘sense’.”
Perhaps our alien would have understood better if it knew about advertising, since few industries owe as much to the ad men as bottled water. Twenty years ago, it was for yuppies and celebrities – now we spend billions on the stuff. What happened to change all that? Millions of pounds of advertising is what happened.
Bottled water is the triumph of marketing over common sense. Consumers aren’t buying water but brands, and if you doubt that, consider that two in five bottles of water sold worldwide are merely filtered tap water. Consider also that in a ‘water tasting’ conducted by the wine magazine, Decanter, Thames tap water came third, ahead of branded water selling for £40 a bottle.
Forget ‘purity’ and ‘mineral content’ too; a home filter system offers exactly the same purity, and mineral content is not proven to have any demonstrable health benefits. The fact is that consumers are being conned. In a country like Britain, where clean water is literally on tap, bottled water is a nonsense.
This is precisely the message of a new campaign, Tap, which is taking on the bottled water industry. With the news full of stories about the credit crunch and climate change, Tap’s message is that bottled water is one thing we can do without. Think of all the bottles you buy at work, on the go or in restaurants and now think about the £500 you could save by turning on to tap – it’s planet-saving and money-saving in one.
To compete with bottled water brands, the campaign has created a brand for tap water and is promoting its message online, at www.wewanttap.com, and in a natty range of Tap branded re-usable water bottles. What’s more, it’s raising money for water projects in the developing world, helping those for whom water isn’t a designer product but a matter of life and death.
Who knows whether the little green men will ever arrive, but for the sake of our little green planet let’s hope we’re drinking tap water when they do.
To discover more about the great bottled water swindle and to buy one of their stylish bottles, visit www.wewanttap.com.