WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.940 This is a bottle of Dasani, Coca-Cola's brand of bottled water. 2 00:00:03.940 --> 00:00:06.360 It is basically Coke without the syrup: 3 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:07.600 like most American bottled water, 4 00:00:07.600 --> 00:00:09.680 it is tap water that's been purified 5 00:00:09.680 --> 00:00:13.680 and then had tiny amounts of minerals deliberately added back into it. 6 00:00:13.680 --> 00:00:15.680 Except... not quite. 7 00:00:15.680 --> 00:00:18.480 This is a British Dasani bottle from 2004, 8 00:00:18.480 --> 00:00:22.430 which was the first and last time that you could ever buy Dasani water in the UK. 9 00:00:22.430 --> 00:00:23.720 And the story of why it failed here 10 00:00:23.720 --> 00:00:27.660 is one of the greatest marketing disaster stories in history. 11 00:00:27.660 --> 00:00:28.900 But it wasn't until I started researching, 12 00:00:28.910 --> 00:00:31.960 searching through newspapers and TV shows from 2004, 13 00:00:31.960 --> 00:00:36.180 that I found that the tale is a little more complicated than I thought. 14 00:00:36.180 --> 00:00:38.480 And a little more complicated than a lot of the world thought. 15 00:00:38.480 --> 00:00:40.340 And it starts years earlier. 16 00:00:40.340 --> 00:00:41.510 Through most of the 1980s, 17 00:00:41.510 --> 00:00:44.530 "bottled water" was something expensive that got ordered at fancy restaurants, 18 00:00:44.530 --> 00:00:46.100 and it was only by the early 90s 19 00:00:46.100 --> 00:00:50.069 that it had started to become a thing that everyday people might want to buy. 20 00:00:50.069 --> 00:00:54.920 On Christmas Day, 1992, British sitcom 'Only Fools and Horses' made fun of that trend 21 00:00:54.920 --> 00:00:57.730 by having its main character, lovable rogue Del Boy, 22 00:00:57.730 --> 00:01:02.080 sell tap water from South London as "Peckham Spring" bottled water. 23 00:01:02.080 --> 00:01:04.600 It's a slow and old-fashioned comedy by today's standards, 24 00:01:04.609 --> 00:01:06.579 and the episode is really weirdly paced, 25 00:01:06.579 --> 00:01:10.530 you're two-thirds of the way through before anyone actually starts bottling water, 26 00:01:10.530 --> 00:01:14.409 but because it was the Christmas Day episode in 1992, 27 00:01:14.409 --> 00:01:17.229 back when most British households only had four channels of television, 28 00:01:17.229 --> 00:01:21.630 that show was watched by more than 20 million people, 29 00:01:21.630 --> 00:01:24.210 more than a third of the entire British population. 30 00:01:24.210 --> 00:01:26.940 And the final joke of that episode is that the water is contaminated 31 00:01:26.940 --> 00:01:31.119 by some chemical barrels that Del Boy dumped in a local pond in the first act. 32 00:01:31.119 --> 00:01:33.579 It is, to be fair, a brilliant closing gag. 33 00:01:33.579 --> 00:01:36.500 And it's one that stuck in the British psyche. 34 00:01:36.500 --> 00:01:39.969 The BBC reran the episode another five times in the years after. 35 00:01:39.969 --> 00:01:43.609 It'll have been on cable and satellite channels many more times than that. 36 00:01:43.609 --> 00:01:48.359 I would guess that by 2004 when Dasani launched, about half of the country, maybe more, 37 00:01:48.359 --> 00:01:50.869 could understand "Peckham Spring" as a reference, 38 00:01:50.869 --> 00:01:54.220 or at least remembered that time Del Boy tried to bottle tap water. 39 00:01:54.220 --> 00:01:59.120 Now, under UK law, "mineral water" is a protected term. 40 00:01:59.120 --> 00:02:02.000 Mineral water must come from a certified underground spring, 41 00:02:02.009 --> 00:02:04.590 it must not be chemically treated in any way, 42 00:02:04.590 --> 00:02:06.600 and is generally under heavy regulation. 43 00:02:06.600 --> 00:02:11.690 And back in 2004, the perception was that bottled water meant mineral water. 44 00:02:11.690 --> 00:02:14.280 Why else would you buy it? It's something you can't get at home. 45 00:02:14.280 --> 00:02:17.320 Over in America, though, the home of Coca-Cola, 46 00:02:17.320 --> 00:02:19.370 the perception of "bottled water" 47 00:02:19.370 --> 00:02:22.940 was that it was just that: it was water, in a bottle. 48 00:02:22.940 --> 00:02:24.840 You were paying for the convenience, and the taste, 49 00:02:24.840 --> 00:02:27.730 and it didn't really matter whether that came from the ground 50 00:02:27.730 --> 00:02:30.340 or from a water purification factory. 51 00:02:30.340 --> 00:02:35.069 To be fair, there are large parts of America where the tap water does not taste or smell good, 52 00:02:35.069 --> 00:02:38.750 and their federal standards aren't great, particularly compared to Europe. 53 00:02:38.750 --> 00:02:42.810 And anyone who's ever taken a vacation to Disney World, for example, 54 00:02:42.810 --> 00:02:47.980 will know that the tap water around Orlando can smell a little... sulphur-y. 55 00:02:47.980 --> 00:02:50.120 But in the UK, the perception was different: 56 00:02:50.120 --> 00:02:52.380 you were buying "mineral water" because it was natural, 57 00:02:52.500 --> 00:02:54.840 [car horn] it had been filtered through rocks for eons, 58 00:02:54.840 --> 00:02:59.770 it was classier and fancier and, perhaps, healthier that what came out of your tap. 59 00:02:59.770 --> 00:03:00.770 That's rubbish, of course, 60 00:03:00.770 --> 00:03:03.959 we have some of the safest tap water in the world and did back then too, 61 00:03:03.959 --> 00:03:06.189 but advertising is powerful 62 00:03:06.189 --> 00:03:10.800 and the idea was that bottled water was filtered and pure straight from the Earth, 63 00:03:10.800 --> 00:03:13.060 it was somehow better. 64 00:03:13.060 --> 00:03:16.980 Coca-Cola were trying to introduce an American-style filtered tap water 65 00:03:16.980 --> 00:03:19.280 to a British mineral water market. 66 00:03:19.280 --> 00:03:21.280 Now, they were not lying about their water. 67 00:03:21.290 --> 00:03:23.319 Their marketing didn't use the phrase "tap water", 68 00:03:23.319 --> 00:03:26.709 they preferred "purified water", but they weren't lying. 69 00:03:26.709 --> 00:03:27.930 It says it on the back of the bottle: 70 00:03:27.930 --> 00:03:31.890 their process "precisely delivers pure still water". 71 00:03:31.890 --> 00:03:33.590 The public might have assumed it was mineral water, 72 00:03:33.590 --> 00:03:35.930 but Coca-Cola never said that. 73 00:03:35.930 --> 00:03:40.340 In fact, what they had done is spend a long time with focus groups, 74 00:03:40.340 --> 00:03:43.120 taste-testing and refining the mineral balance and the flavour of the water, 75 00:03:43.120 --> 00:03:47.390 making a version of Dasani that was ideal for the British palate. 76 00:03:47.390 --> 00:03:50.380 Dasani launched with the first stage of what was going to be 77 00:03:50.380 --> 00:03:55.480 a £7million advertising campaign on February 10, 2004. 78 00:03:55.480 --> 00:03:57.590 And... it went okay! For weeks. 79 00:03:57.590 --> 00:04:00.140 The British public either didn't notice or didn't care that it was tap water, 80 00:04:00.140 --> 00:04:02.579 just the way Americans don't seem to care. 81 00:04:02.579 --> 00:04:06.750 There were occasional rough patches for the launch, like shopkeepers in Buxton, 82 00:04:06.750 --> 00:04:09.049 a town famous for its mineral water, 83 00:04:09.049 --> 00:04:11.620 complaining about being forced by their contracts with Coca-Cola 84 00:04:11.620 --> 00:04:15.780 to replace bottles of the local water in coolers with Dasani. 85 00:04:15.780 --> 00:04:18.400 Or the regulators launching an investigation 86 00:04:18.400 --> 00:04:22.580 into whether Coca-Cola should be using the word "pure" on the label. 87 00:04:22.580 --> 00:04:24.920 But on the whole, it went okay. 88 00:04:24.920 --> 00:04:28.500 A lot of articles written more recently claim that Coca-Cola's first blunder 89 00:04:28.510 --> 00:04:32.890 was copying an American Dasani slogan, "can't live without spunk" -- 90 00:04:32.890 --> 00:04:35.630 which has a very different meaning in the UK. 91 00:04:35.630 --> 00:04:37.190 But I don't think that's true. 92 00:04:37.190 --> 00:04:40.220 The only actual evidence I could find of that slogan is a screenshot 93 00:04:40.220 --> 00:04:42.380 on one tech news web site that liked innuendo. 94 00:04:42.380 --> 00:04:45.680 It looks a web designer reused some American ad images 95 00:04:45.680 --> 00:04:48.570 in one part of a Flash-based web site that almost no-one saw. 96 00:04:48.570 --> 00:04:53.030 No other article from the time, that I can find, anyway, mentions that slogan at all. 97 00:04:53.030 --> 00:04:56.970 Y'know, the advertising was put together by Coca-Cola's UK division: they're not stupid. 98 00:04:56.970 --> 00:05:00.630 In fact, the advertising team was probably breathing a sigh of relief. 99 00:05:00.630 --> 00:05:04.100 All things considered, the launch had been successful. 100 00:05:04.100 --> 00:05:07.780 And then it all went wrong, very very quickly. 101 00:05:07.780 --> 00:05:10.690 Exactly three weeks after launch, March 2nd, 102 00:05:10.690 --> 00:05:13.910 most of the major British newspapers simultaneously put out big stories 103 00:05:13.910 --> 00:05:17.380 announcing that Dasani was bottled tap water. 104 00:05:17.380 --> 00:05:19.570 Most of them mentioned that episode of 'Only Fools and Horses', 105 00:05:19.570 --> 00:05:23.290 and all of them made a lot of noise implying that it was a ripoff, 106 00:05:23.290 --> 00:05:26.610 although perhaps they didn't put it in quite so few words. 107 00:05:26.610 --> 00:05:30.700 And back when a lot of people actually read physical newspapers, 108 00:05:30.700 --> 00:05:36.770 front-page news saying that your product is a ripoff does make a big difference to sales. 109 00:05:36.770 --> 00:05:42.430 But why was it suddenly news, everywhere, at the same time, after three silent weeks? 110 00:05:42.430 --> 00:05:45.570 The missing piece of the puzzle is one journalist called Graham Hiscott, 111 00:05:45.570 --> 00:05:47.380 who worked for the Press Association. 112 00:05:47.380 --> 00:05:51.530 And as he tells it, as part of a brilliant half-hour documentary made later that year, 113 00:05:51.530 --> 00:05:54.970 he happened to be flipping through an issue of The Grocer, 114 00:05:54.970 --> 00:05:57.510 an industry magazine, at work one day. 115 00:05:57.510 --> 00:06:03.020 And that's an event that the documentary asked him to recreate for some reason. 116 00:06:03.020 --> 00:06:07.190 Now, The Grocer is an ideal source for journalists looking for the next story 117 00:06:07.190 --> 00:06:09.730 about a product recall or a weird marketing strategy. 118 00:06:09.730 --> 00:06:13.010 And that issue of the magazine had a feature on bottled water, 119 00:06:13.010 --> 00:06:15.960 and there was just one line in one article, 120 00:06:15.960 --> 00:06:20.680 describing Dasani as a "mineral-enhanced treated tap water". 121 00:06:20.680 --> 00:06:23.260 Which, when written so clearly, seemed odd: 122 00:06:23.260 --> 00:06:25.710 so Graham called Coca-Cola, and they said, yes, 123 00:06:25.710 --> 00:06:29.300 Dasani is treated tap water from the mains supply at their bottling plant: 124 00:06:29.300 --> 00:06:32.930 right there, in Sidcup, south London. 125 00:06:32.930 --> 00:06:36.760 Ten miles from Peckham, where that episode of Only Fools and Horses was set. 126 00:06:36.760 --> 00:06:38.280 A few hours after that phone call, 127 00:06:38.280 --> 00:06:42.770 there was an article on the Press Association newswire about where Dasani came from. 128 00:06:42.770 --> 00:06:45.590 Articles on the newswire don't usually go straight to the public: 129 00:06:45.590 --> 00:06:49.280 they go to other journalists first, who can use them or adapt them. 130 00:06:49.280 --> 00:06:54.200 And the editors at most of the newspapers correctly decided that, yes, 131 00:06:54.200 --> 00:06:57.720 this was something their readers would be interested in. 132 00:06:57.720 --> 00:07:01.680 Six months earlier, when Coca-Cola was setting out preparations for their Dasani launch, 133 00:07:01.680 --> 00:07:04.050 The Grocer had run a small article about it. 134 00:07:04.050 --> 00:07:06.570 And there's a line in there that's prophetic: 135 00:07:06.570 --> 00:07:12.620 "one senior buyer warned that some consumers may be put off by the water's lack of provenance". 136 00:07:12.620 --> 00:07:18.030 And now, "Coke bottles tap water for a 3,000% markup" was on the front pages. 137 00:07:18.030 --> 00:07:21.530 But Coca-Cola, and Dasani, soldiered on. That didn't kill the brand. 138 00:07:21.530 --> 00:07:23.250 They put more marketing budget behind it. 139 00:07:23.250 --> 00:07:25.949 They gave away free bottles in supermarkets. 140 00:07:25.949 --> 00:07:30.570 Another article in the Grocer from back then quotes Coca-Cola's UK marketing director: 141 00:07:30.570 --> 00:07:34.230 "There cannot be many people who do not know about Dasani now... 142 00:07:34.230 --> 00:07:39.900 "I cannot imagine how much we would have had to spend to get that level of awareness." 143 00:07:39.900 --> 00:07:44.150 There is a theory that there's no such thing as bad publicity, after all. 144 00:07:44.150 --> 00:07:47.680 The final nail in the coffin was the contamination. 145 00:07:47.680 --> 00:07:51.160 They'd had a bad batch of calcium chloride delivered right here, 146 00:07:51.160 --> 00:07:53.390 it's one of the chemicals they used in the purification process, 147 00:07:53.390 --> 00:07:57.940 and tests revealed that their water contained above the legal limits of bromate, 148 00:07:57.940 --> 00:07:59.430 a cancer-causing chemical. 149 00:07:59.430 --> 00:08:02.650 There wasn't anywhere near enough in the water to do harm, 150 00:08:02.650 --> 00:08:05.290 but there was enough that it was outside the legal limit. 151 00:08:05.290 --> 00:08:09.240 So within 24 hours, every unsold bottle was recalled back here, 152 00:08:09.240 --> 00:08:11.440 and the shelves were empty. Just like Del Boy, 153 00:08:11.440 --> 00:08:13.460 not only had Coca-Cola sold tap water in a bottle, 154 00:08:13.460 --> 00:08:17.560 but they'd sold contaminated tap water in a bottle. 155 00:08:17.560 --> 00:08:19.320 Dasani never returned to shops. 156 00:08:19.320 --> 00:08:22.500 It never launched in France or Germany, like they were planning. 157 00:08:22.500 --> 00:08:23.500 And to this day, 158 00:08:23.500 --> 00:08:27.330 if you type "Dasani" into Google UK, you get results about the disaster, 159 00:08:27.330 --> 00:08:30.920 news reports from 2004 on the first page. 160 00:08:30.920 --> 00:08:34.159 Coca-Cola launched other water brands, of course, but as far as I can tell, 161 00:08:34.159 --> 00:08:36.069 they all look to be spring waters or mineral waters: 162 00:08:36.069 --> 00:08:39.269 they're not hooking up a purifier to the tap. 163 00:08:39.269 --> 00:08:40.360 Not over here. 164 00:08:40.360 --> 00:08:42.310 There are other folks selling purified tap water, of course, 165 00:08:42.310 --> 00:08:45.910 but that's usually the cheap option on the shelf. 166 00:08:45.910 --> 00:08:48.900 Not that it matters. It's all just water. 167 00:08:48.900 --> 00:08:53.420 And I reckon Coca-Cola could absolutely have made this work. Maybe they still could. 168 00:08:53.420 --> 00:08:56.920 There is a world in which one journalist didn't use the words "tap water", 169 00:08:56.920 --> 00:09:00.230 or another journalist didn't happen to look at one particular article, 170 00:09:00.230 --> 00:09:02.560 and where the launch went just fine, 171 00:09:02.560 --> 00:09:07.810 and Britain got used to the fact that drinking bottled purified tap water could be normal. 172 00:09:07.810 --> 00:09:10.250 After all, if it had become a popular brand, 173 00:09:10.250 --> 00:09:12.970 no-one would want to admit their purchases might be questionable: 174 00:09:12.970 --> 00:09:15.220 it's a lot easier to just say "yeah, that's fine, of course, 175 00:09:15.220 --> 00:09:17.560 "I know it's tap water" than go 176 00:09:17.560 --> 00:09:19.760 "hang on, I've been paying how much for what?" 177 00:09:19.760 --> 00:09:21.740 and worry that you might have been ripped off. 178 00:09:21.740 --> 00:09:25.459 I don't think the Dasani disaster was inevitable. 179 00:09:25.459 --> 00:09:26.459 But it happened. 180 00:09:26.459 --> 00:09:30.700 And all that's left, sixteen years later, is a few bottles like this. 181 00:09:38.500 --> 00:09:40.980 - Shame about the people honking, wasn't it? - Yeah, right? 182 00:09:40.980 --> 00:09:43.260 - Yeah! They might've... and I'll tell you what, we timed that well, 183 00:09:43.260 --> 00:09:44.910 because here comes a lorry!