brand the unbrandable
I gave a short talk at an interesting event called greengaged yesterday, which is part of the London Design Festival.
I heard another speaker named Joshua Blackburn talk about a cool project he developed to try to brand tap water. He rattled off the statistics we all know about the environmental hazards of bottled water, and then said that the main culprit was branding. People aren’t buying Evian for the water. They’re buying it for the brand. So, he proposed branding itself as the antidote.
Rather than preach to consumers, he created a brand called "Tap", which you can use to feel better about drinking your own tap water. "Tap water really needs an image makeover".
The campaign comes complete with faux Tap labels to put around bottles you might have already bought (so you can get a few more uses out of it before you dispose of it). He organized blind taste tests (the Tap challenge) around the UK and online. He’s creating stickers for willing restaurants to put in their windows ("now serving Tap"). The "product" is what you already have flowing out of your tap. He is just trying to make it cooler.
There’s more at wewanttap.com and an article from the Evening Standard comparing it to the Anya Hindmarch "I am not a Plastic Bag" bag.
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You mean like this?
http://tapdny.com/
I think he’s right – it is all about image. The number of house design magazines that have San Pellegrino on is staggering. But, it’s a great brand, and easily identified.
I do like the NY Tap water – they’ve done a great job.
Best wishes,
Jon
Thanks, Jonas and Jon, it is a bit like NY Tap water. What I like about Tap though is that you fill it from your own tap. There’s no bottling operation or transporting at all (even locally). It teaches you to appreciate the tap water that you already have. And then it brands it.
This is a great idea and a good blog topic – thanks for sharing. Reminds me of the group called Take Back the Tap I saw at a wine tasting event in Berkeley this past weekend – they had a keg of tap water on hand for clearing your palette. It made a lot of sense. http://takebackthetap.org/
I hadn’t really thought about the branding issues for – what would you call them? natural items? – before Michael Pollan’s writing alerted me to the disadvantages fruit has in the supermarket for advertising its health benefits. He argues, rather humorously, that anything covered in health claims is probably not as good for you as something that just sits there as nature intended. Obviously, in the case of tap water there’s usually still some cleansing/purification process, but that’s to be expected and is different from injecting vitamins/nutrients into something that doesn’t need them. It’s not that there aren’t marketing efforts around fruits and vegetables – pomegranate and apple are well known examples – but they aren’t as visible somehow.
I like this idea however I wonder where the fluoride will fit into this branding?
Mike Ashworth