Trendy Water?

Over the years I’ve brought you any number of stories about things that are supposed to add value to a product – or provide value to the customer – that are better examples of wishful thinking than they are of the value added concept. My favorite one is still the “Instant Ice Cube” product – “Just pop in the freezer!” – which turns out to be less hype than a disposable ice tray filled with purified water that you can freeze, take the ice out of, and then (hopefully!) recycle, all for just ten times the price of a regular ice cube tray and a bottle of purified water that you could use to make over and over again for days. The product never sold that well, partly because the price was completely ridiculous, but mostly because pouring water into an ice cube tray isn’t difficult enough that people would be willing to spend an extra $10 on it; hence, no actual value was added to the product. At the time, I could not imagine a more laughable attempt to add value to a product, but it turns out that there is…

A story this week on Salon tells the story of a new Nestle product called “Resource” – a bottle of purified water marketed at women who are looking for more of a lifestyle accessory than a hydration resource. That’s it; that’s the entire value added by this product. Apparently, the company has developed an advertising campaign that shows women doing things that would appeal to women who are (or want to pretend that they are) trendy, fashionable, and upper-class, in the hopes that customers will purchase the bottles and carry them around as an actual accessory or status symbol…

Now, as loopy as this sounds, it’s not the first time this sort of thing has been attempted. Many years ago there was a campaign by Perrier extoling its supposedly “natural” carbonation and the quality of its water as being superior to all other sparkling waters then on the market, and we have also seen companies try this with “still” mineral waters like Evian and Fiji Water. But in all of those cases the company added (or at least claimed to have added) something to the basic nature of the product; getting the water from exotic sources with superior taste or bubbles or whatever. Resource isn’t on the market yet, but so far there isn’t any indication that the company has any special argument for why you should buy it other than its value as a lifestyle accessory or a status symbol or anything else that you couldn’t also get by pouring water into an empty Resource bottle and then carrying that around with you instead…

I could be wrong about this, of course; there were apparently enough people out there who were buying the plastic water bottle with $40 worth of crystals hand-glued to the outside (and tap water on the inside) for that company to last a couple of years. And there is also no indication that Nestle plans to price Resource any higher than the drinking water they already sell, in which case this is no sillier than Arrowhead water or good old Sparklets water doing the same thing. But if Nestle is going to try to sell this stuff as a premium product they’d better start looking into anything else they can include to add some additional value…