This is a bottle of Dasani, Coca-Cola's brand
of bottled water.
It is basically Coke without the syrup:
like most American bottled water,
it is tap water that's been purified
and then had tiny amounts of minerals
deliberately added back into it.
Except... not quite.
This is a British Dasani bottle
from 2004,
which was the first and last time that you
could ever buy Dasani water in the UK.
And the story of why it failed here
is one of the greatest marketing
disaster stories in history.
But it wasn't until I started researching,
searching through newspapers
and TV shows from 2004,
that I found that the tale is a little more
complicated than I thought.
And a little more complicated
than a lot of the world thought.
And it starts years earlier.
Through most of the 1980s,
"bottled water" was something expensive that
got ordered at fancy restaurants,
and it was only by the early 90s
that it had started to become a thing that
everyday people might want to buy.
On Christmas Day, 1992, British sitcom
'Only Fools and Horses' made fun of that trend
by having its main character,
lovable rogue Del Boy,
sell tap water from South London as
"Peckham Spring" bottled water.
It's a slow and old-fashioned comedy
by today's standards,
and the episode is really weirdly paced,
you're two-thirds of the way through before
anyone actually starts bottling water,
but because it was the Christmas Day episode
in 1992,
back when most British households only had
four channels of television,
that show was watched by more than
20 million people,
more than a third of the entire British population.
And the final joke of that episode
is that the water is contaminated
by some chemical barrels that Del Boy
dumped in a local pond in the first act.
It is, to be fair, a brilliant closing gag.
And it's one that stuck in the British psyche.
The BBC reran the episode another five times
in the years after.
It'll have been on cable and satellite channels
many more times than that.
I would guess that by 2004 when Dasani launched,
about half of the country, maybe more,
could understand "Peckham Spring" as a reference,
or at least remembered that time Del Boy
tried to bottle tap water.
Now, under UK law, "mineral water"
is a protected term.
Mineral water must come from
a certified underground spring,
it must not be
chemically treated in any way,
and is generally under heavy regulation.
And back in 2004, the perception was that
bottled water meant mineral water.
Why else would you buy it?
It's something you can't get at home.
Over in America, though,
the home of Coca-Cola,
the perception of
"bottled water"
was that it was just that:
it was water, in a bottle.
You were paying for the convenience,
and the taste,
and it didn't really matter whether that came
from the ground
or from a water purification factory.
To be fair, there are large parts of America
where the tap water does not taste or smell good,
and their federal standards aren't great,
particularly compared to Europe.
And anyone who's ever taken a vacation to
Disney World, for example,
will know that the tap water around Orlando
can smell a little... sulphur-y.
But in the UK, the perception was different:
you were buying "mineral water"
because it was natural,
[car horn]
it had been filtered through rocks for eons,
it was classier and fancier and, perhaps,
healthier that what came out of your tap.
That's rubbish, of course,
we have some of the safest tap water in the
world and did back then too,
but advertising is powerful
and the idea was that bottled water was filtered
and pure straight from the Earth,
it was somehow better.
Coca-Cola were trying to introduce an
American-style filtered tap water
to a British mineral water market.
Now, they were not lying about their water.
Their marketing didn't use
the phrase "tap water",
they preferred "purified water",
but they weren't lying.
It says it on the back of the bottle:
their process "precisely delivers
pure still water".
The public might have assumed
it was mineral water,
but Coca-Cola never said that.
In fact, what they had done is spend
a long time with focus groups,
taste-testing and refining the mineral balance
and the flavour of the water,
making a version of Dasani that was ideal
for the British palate.
Dasani launched with the first stage
of what was going to be
a £7million advertising campaign
on February 10, 2004.
And... it went okay!
For weeks.
The British public either didn't notice
or didn't care that it was tap water,
just the way Americans don't seem to care.
There were occasional rough patches for the
launch, like shopkeepers in Buxton,
a town famous for its mineral water,
complaining about being forced by their contracts
with Coca-Cola
to replace bottles of the local water
in coolers with Dasani.
Or the regulators launching an investigation
into whether Coca-Cola should be using the
word "pure" on the label.
But on the whole, it went okay.
A lot of articles written more recently claim
that Coca-Cola's first blunder
was copying an American Dasani slogan,
"can't live without spunk" --
which has a very different meaning
in the UK.
But I don't think that's true.
The only actual evidence I could find
of that slogan is a screenshot
on one tech news web site
that liked innuendo.
It looks a web designer reused some American
ad images
in one part of a Flash-based web site
that almost no-one saw.
No other article from the time, that I can
find, anyway, mentions that slogan at all.
Y'know, the advertising was put together by
Coca-Cola's UK division: they're not stupid.
In fact, the advertising team was probably
breathing a sigh of relief.
All things considered,
the launch had been successful.
And then it all went wrong, very very quickly.
Exactly three weeks after launch,
March 2nd,
most of the major British newspapers simultaneously
put out big stories
announcing that Dasani was bottled tap water.
Most of them mentioned that episode of
'Only Fools and Horses',
and all of them made a lot of noise implying
that it was a ripoff,
although perhaps they didn't put it in quite
so few words.
And back when a lot of people actually read
physical newspapers,
front-page news saying that your product is
a ripoff does make a big difference to sales.
But why was it suddenly news, everywhere,
at the same time, after three silent weeks?
The missing piece of the puzzle is one journalist
called Graham Hiscott,
who worked for the Press Association.
And as he tells it, as part of a brilliant half-hour
documentary made later that year,
he happened to be flipping through an issue
of The Grocer,
an industry magazine, at work one day.
And that's an event that the documentary
asked him to recreate for some reason.
Now, The Grocer is an ideal source for journalists
looking for the next story
about a product recall or a
weird marketing strategy.
And that issue of the magazine had a feature
on bottled water,
and there was just one line in one article,
describing Dasani as a
"mineral-enhanced treated tap water".
Which, when written so clearly, seemed odd:
so Graham called Coca-Cola,
and they said, yes,
Dasani is treated tap water from the mains
supply at their bottling plant:
right there, in Sidcup, south London.
Ten miles from Peckham, where that episode
of Only Fools and Horses was set.
A few hours after that phone call,
there was an article on the Press Association
newswire about where Dasani came from.
Articles on the newswire don't usually go
straight to the public:
they go to other journalists first,
who can use them or adapt them.
And the editors at most of the newspapers
correctly decided that, yes,
this was something their readers would be
interested in.
Six months earlier, when Coca-Cola was setting
out preparations for their Dasani launch,
The Grocer had run a small article about it.
And there's a line in there that's prophetic:
"one senior buyer warned that some consumers
may be put off by the water's lack of provenance".
And now, "Coke bottles tap water for a 3,000%
markup" was on the front pages.
But Coca-Cola, and Dasani, soldiered on.
That didn't kill the brand.
They put more marketing budget behind it.
They gave away free bottles in supermarkets.
Another article in the Grocer from back then
quotes Coca-Cola's UK marketing director:
"There cannot be many people who do not know
about Dasani now...
"I cannot imagine how much we would have had
to spend to get that level of awareness."
There is a theory that there's no such thing
as bad publicity, after all.
The final nail in the coffin was the contamination.
They'd had a bad batch of calcium chloride
delivered right here,
it's one of the chemicals they used
in the purification process,
and tests revealed that their water contained
above the legal limits of bromate,
a cancer-causing chemical.
There wasn't anywhere near enough in the water
to do harm,
but there was enough that
it was outside the legal limit.
So within 24 hours, every unsold bottle
was recalled back here,
and the shelves were empty.
Just like Del Boy,
not only had Coca-Cola sold
tap water in a bottle,
but they'd sold contaminated tap water
in a bottle.
Dasani never returned to shops.
It never launched in France or Germany,
like they were planning.
And to this day,
if you type "Dasani" into Google UK,
you get results about the disaster,
news reports from 2004 on the first page.
Coca-Cola launched other water brands,
of course, but as far as I can tell,
they all look to be
spring waters or mineral waters:
they're not hooking up a purifier to the tap.
Not over here.
There are other folks selling
purified tap water, of course,
but that's usually the
cheap option on the shelf.
Not that it matters.
It's all just water.
And I reckon Coca-Cola could absolutely have
made this work. Maybe they still could.
There is a world in which one journalist didn't
use the words "tap water",
or another journalist didn't happen to look
at one particular article,
and where the launch went just fine,
and Britain got used to the fact that drinking
bottled purified tap water could be normal.
After all, if it had become a popular brand,
no-one would want to admit their purchases
might be questionable:
it's a lot easier to just say
"yeah, that's fine, of course,
"I know it's tap water" than go
"hang on, I've been paying how much for what?"
and worry that you might
have been ripped off.
I don't think the Dasani disaster was inevitable.
But it happened.
And all that's left, sixteen years later,
is a few bottles like this.
- Shame about the people honking, wasn't it?
- Yeah, right?
- Yeah! They might've... and I'll tell you what,
we timed that well,
because here comes a lorry!
