While, mainstream Christian tradition holds that Jesus performed his first public miracle at the wedding at Cana, turning water into wine; ethical brands today offer consumers another form of miracle via consumption. They give the opportunity to save lives by buying bottled water. In recent years I have noticed a plethora of new ‘ethical water brands’ entering the UK market one after the other. I was at the Natural History Museum last week end and picked up a bottle of Life Water and thought: “I really ought to write an article about this on my blog!”Firstly, I want to start with a little historical background on the fantastic marketing tale the bottle water industry is. I will then see how ethical brands provide a potential renewal of consumers’ confidence for an industry facing criticisms, general disenchantments and profit loss. I will finally offer possible insights on the problems these ethical brands could face in the not so far future.
The History of Bottled water: from the Victory of Marketing and Branding Hype to the loss of faith.
Can you even remember a world without bottled water? The BBC three-part series ‘the Foods that Make Billions’ really grabbed my attention; especially ‘liquid gold’ the episode dedicated to the story of the development of the multi-billion dollar market of bottled water. The episode showed how entrepreneurs and multinational corporations like Nestle, Evian and Coca Cola transformed simple commodities into everyday necessities and highly profitable brands. Bottled water has become liquid gold, emblematic of an age of plenty in the West. The bottled water industry is a global industry worth billions of pounds. "I think bottled water is the most revealing substance for showing us how the global capitalist market works today," says Richard Wilk, professor of anthropology at Indiana University. "In a sense we're buying choice, we're buying freedom. Through a confection of advertising and marketing, bottled water has become one of the biggest success stories in the modern food and beverage industry”. 
The link between bottled water and the health and wellness movement was a recipe for success. But water bottle was becoming morally unacceptable. Around 200 billion bottles globally are consumed per year. At the heart of the problem is what bottled water is actually made of, oil and water; the world's two most precious resources, in one neat package. Bottled water has, in fact, come under criticism in recent years for the environmental impacts of groundwater extraction, the energy and environmental costs of the plastic packaging and transportation costs, and concerns about water quality and the validity of some marketing claims. With the bottle industry across the globe coming under scrutiny, ethical brands could offer a way to rebuild consumers’ confidence in the liquid gold.
Ethical bottled water a new hope or a niche market doomed to fail?
Popular ethical brands have doubled their sales volume on the UK market, according to segment analyst Zenith International thus highlighting new areas of consumer resonance. WH2O are these social enterprises who engage in ethical projects? Are they really trying to make a difference, or are they using this trend to differentiate themselves in an already over crowded market? They all sell the same basic product (bottled water) and use a mix of the usual visual and textual rhetorical contents used by charities and bottled water brands (the color blue, the health benefits of water, the global water crisis, the seemingly automatic link between donations and benefits for the needy expressed in their copy-writing style).
The trend is followed in the UK by:
ONE water for their Global Ethics Foundation. Their slogan: “do one good thing”. With ONE, all profits help fund water solutions in Africa and they bottle locally to minimize food miles. They were the official water @ live 8 and Make Poverty History and are now the official water of Virgin Altantic (philantrotainment meets philantrocommerce once again!). They have opened new range of like for like ethical products such as condoms funding HIV projects, water coolers, eggs, handwash and toilet tissue for sanitation projects, fruit juices…
ps: I was fortunate enough to personally meet Duncan Goose, the founder of ONE water, in their office in Holborn. He is a very inspiring man who has a tremendous amount of passion, dedication and vision for his brand. I wish them the best in their business conquest!
Thirsty planet: “High quality British spring water with a difference”. They raised £ 1.4 million to date and give a fixed donation to the charity Pump Aid providing sustainable water solutions across Africa for each bottle sold. They insist on transparency and accountability which I think are the key factor for success in this industry. Their slogans “Buy a bottle change a life” and “doing something truly amazing really doesn’t get any easier” again place the emphasis on how easy it is to make a change. 
Belu Water for the Belu Foundation: “working towards a more sustainable future” “the UK’s most eco-friendly brand of bottled water”. This brand insists on sustainability and a minimalist approach. They created the first 100% carbon neutral bottled water with plastic bottles made from corn and not oil, and deliver one month of clean water per bottle they sell.
Frank Water Products raising funds for the FRANK Water Projects “clean water saves lives” and “be part of the solution”. This project was developed by Katie Alcott in 2005 after she visited India and contracted dysentery after drinking dirty water. The social enterprise give 100% of its profits to the charity.
Life Pure Bottled Water: “Drink Well Be Happy”. This brand (not to be confused with the Nestlé Pure Life product) appears to me as a consumer as the most attractive one. Their brand and website is extremely young, interactive and fun as if they were following the model of marketing campaings used by Evian, Ben & Jerry, Innocent drinks and LoveDaPop.They have a simple layout and really portray their brand as a win-win situation for the consumer’s personal well-being and those who need clean water. They place water as a basic human right and use quotes from Da Vinci and Ganghi (“Water is the driving force of all nature” Leonardo Da Vinci.
yet highlighting that “over a billion people in the world are without access to it”. They are committed to deliver a drop of clean water via the drop4drop charity, to a developing world community for every drop of Life you drink. Life takes responsibility for the world’s water crisis. On their inventive website, a little charachter picks up Life bottles, rests underneath a tree and drinks water and then feeling great! Water runs on your screen, a drop sound is made at each click, they use dare I say ‘trendy’ expressions such as Detox, Be healthy, be beautiful with humor (we must warn you…smooth skin and glowing complexions are often known side effects from drinking plenty of Life water).
in the US by
Ethos Water purchased by Starbucks Coffee Company in 2005 (Starbucks who also works with product RED), helping children get clean water.
Nika Water (helping the world never tasted so good, choice is a priviledge, giving 100% of its profits towards organisations, when you chose Nika water you help save lives) very colorful website.
Criticisms:
Are these altruistic claims intimately tied to major advertising campaigns designed to convince the public to buy their products? Ethos for example has been heavily criticised for being primarily commercial because only approximately $0.05 to $0.10 of the retail price ($1.80) goes to charity. Nevertheless, according to the Ethos water homepage, the company has raised around $6.2 million to date.Cause related marketing lends brands a social image and injects a charitable dimension into consumer spending. This type of marketing is often criticised for being preyed on the heart of the consumer by capitalizing on guilt and conscience. Companies employing these types of ad campaigns try to convince the public that they are doing the right thing. Their goal is to associate the purchase of a bottled of water with a good deed in order to convince people that their products are beneficial to society while ensuring continued sales growth. Schemes like this, while very commendable, are being said to not actually reduce the environmental impact of producing and transporting bottled water. All I will say is that I would rather buy hundreds of ONE, LIFE, BELU or FRANK bottled water than a ridiculous limited edition bottle of bling H2O ‘welcome to the life’ endorsed by Paris Hilton and decorated with Swarovski crystals. Fancy a super luxurious water that costs from $55 up to $2,600 per bottle in a time of recession and global water crisis? Beyond the financial argument, I find this deeply untactful and even laughable.
Future prospects for ethical brands:
being bought by Goliath and remaining a David amongst the Davids
Amusingly, one of Pepsi's great straplines, when translated into one of the Chinese languages, read “Brings your dead ancestors back to life”. Now, more seriously, Goliath brands like Starbucks, Coke, Pepsi could soon be the new saviors, preventing millions of deaths from water-related illnesses. Pepsi and Coke are both now well involved with water projects around the world. One argument is that as worthy as many small ethical brands are it is the big ones that really make a difference. Enrolling in global ethical projects would certainly add weight to new meaning to Coke’s famous
straplines ‘Life tastes good’ and ‘Coke adds life’ and strengthen their reputation. Multinational company seem to have picked up on this quite recently and are increasingly buying the small ethical brands. The body Shop for example has been bought by L’Oreal, in the bottled water industry, Ethos has been bought by the giant Starbucks. Business commentators tend to see these acquisitions as part of a general trend by multinationals to move in on the ethical sector. The sales growth of ethical products is now so significant that the risk of being involved seems lower than the risk of not being involved. Big companies have begun to understand that corporate responsibility is a really important issue, and at the same time that it is a potentially very profitable trend. According to ethical business specialist Craig Smith, "My guess is that they’re hedging their bets at relatively low cost. It can be extremely expensive to create brands like these." Others compare this practice with that of big pharmaceutical companies which are increasingly buying risk-taking innovative companies rather than doing their own research and development. It's also worth noting that it can be difficult for a big brand with a tarnished reputation to launch its own ethical products, and that buying a new brand is one way of trying to get round this problem.
Another view of all this acquisition and ethical mainstreaming is that campaigners for social change should be celebrating. Roger Cowe, a financial commentator states: "If you want to change what people consume on a grand scale, you have to penetrate mass markets. And you can’t do that if you're a small specialist brand stuck in the organic or wholefood niche, even if that means you are on supermarket shelves. It is a familiar dilemma: stay pure and have a big impact on a small scale, or compromise and have a small impact on a grand scale."
Both Craig Sams from Green and Black’s and Anita Roddick from The Body Shop are on record as saying that they believe that an acquired ethical company can influence its new parent to improve its corporate behaviour.
Mark Palmer, marketing director for Green & Blacks, has suggested the eventual evolution of a kind of two tier moral market. "Ethical trading will be a requisite. But there will be some blurring and confusion. In ten years time, there will be the super-ethical niche brands, and bigger brands that carry the spirit into the mainstream." Indeed how is a consumer supposed to make an informed decision between the good and the bad ethical brands when the market will be saturated with them? I think it would become necessary to have an external body that will regulate and standardize ethical brands. Maybe a registered certification label similar to the Fairtrade, Veriflora, Energy Star, or USDA marks could bring the transparency this market needs in order for the consumer to make the difference between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ ethical brands. Maybe this is too simplistic, dichotomus (“black and white thinking”) but I think the momentum exists. Today’s ethical brands have a really hard task at hand. They need to be transparent, accountable, understandable, competitive in a saturated market, different from each other, provide extensive feedback on their achievements (via privately sent e-mails for customers who subscribe to the newsletter and extensive use of social media, specific Iphone apps) so that they can establish customer loyalty and trust in the long run and of the above in a fresh, attractive and youthful manner.
In our postmodern, brand-obsessed and commodity fetichist society, ethical brands appear to be a breath of fresh air and bring hope into the consumer machine. Just as Jean Baudrillard highlighted it, objects do not hold essential value any longer but confer prestige and social value, status and power. Products and brands in particular offer pieces of identities to the deconstructed self. Ethical bottled water brands position themselves as offering the consumer with the symbolic capital of the ‘good’ shopper, the ‘ethical’/positive tag, whilst claiming to bring sustainable solutions to the global water crisis. Albeit contributing to changing the lives of many on the planet, brands such as ONE, Life, Ethos, thirsty planet, Belu or Nika already face a good amount of criticism. These brands have to face criticism inherent to the very nature of charity and development work but they also have to face intense competition from unethical and ethical brands. Each brand also faces or will face a moral challenge: shall we remain a niche independent entity or join the mainstream? It remains to be seen whether niche or mainstream ethical products will deliver the greatest change. Both types of product do not of course exist in isolation and will continue to influence each other. Although there are specific issues of concern around each particular takeover, and there is a case for improving the structures that 'institutionalise social mission' (certification label?), it is difficult to see why the mainstreaming of ethical products should not be seen as anything other than a triumph for those campaigning for change. Just as the Cana episode in Jesus’ life was of major symbolic importance that lead to more miracles, maybe the ethical water bottles brands pinpoint at a new win-win venture technique that will lead other areas of consumption towards the path of social enterprise and bettering of human life.
