H.L. Mencken was right: US consumers are daft

It’s been a long time coming. American consumers are finally waking up to the fact that big business has been duping of them for years over the very stuff of life.

This week, the US media and public woke up to the fact that their country’s two biggest-selling brands of bottled water — PepsiCo’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani — are not mineral waters at all. Yup, they’re both just purified tap water.

Following pressure from the Boston-based activists Corporate Accountability International, PepsiCo has decided it’s time to ‘fess’ up.

Boston-based CAI is targeting the bottled water industry with a major campaign called Think Outside the Bottle. Among other things it argues the industry is hugely wasteful of resources such as fuel, glass and plastic, and that the vast majority of its plastic bottles will languish in landfill sites for many centuries.

The pressure group is also highlighting the lack of difference in taste, quality or purity between bottled water and tap water. In particular, the group has argued that the pristine-looking mountains which feature on Aquafina’s label give the distinct impression the product must be spring water when, in reality, it is nothing of the sort.

In the face of this pressure, PepsiCo, headquarted in Purchase, New York, has buckled. It has agreed to replace the potentially misleading statement “Bottled at The Source P.W.S.” on Aquafina’s bottle with the marginally less deceitful phrase “public water source”.

However Atlanta-based Coca-Cola is showing no intention of following suit. Spokeswoman Diana Garza Ciarlante said: “We don’t believe that consumers are confused about the source of Dasani water. The label clearly states that it is purified water.”

Oh yes! I’d imagine that most people have a pretty hazy notion of what a “purified water” actually is. Very few will be aware the phrase means that Dasani is, to all intents and purposes, the same as the stuff you get out of the tap. Only with a circa 1,000% mark-up.

It could be that Coca-Cola is holding out because it suspects that, were it to tamper with the Dasani brand, it could risk an almighty backlash.

In 1985 the company alienated millions of consumers when it tampered with Coke (the original cola was scrapped and replaced with a me-too to Pepsi that was called “New Coke” in April 1985. After widespread consumer unrest, the company reintroduced the original product as Coke Classic)

Also, it was only three years ago that the Atlanta-based soft drinks giant was deeply humiliated in the UK market when the British media and public swiftly saw through its attempts to flog them bottled tap water at near mineral water prices, an attempt also made under the Dasani name. At the time, in March 2004, the Daily Star screamed: “Are they taking us for plonkers?”

Parallels were drawn with attempts by the fictional South London trader, “Del Boy” Trotter and his mate Rodney to foist a similarly sourced “Peckham Spring” water on an unsuspecting public. By serendipity, a scene along these lines had appeared in the BBC’s sitcom ‘Only Fools and Horses’ in 1992.

Within a few weeks of Dasani’s high-profile UK launch — and after an avalanche of negative publicity that was exacerbated by the the discovery that some Dasani bottles had been contaminated with a potentially carcinogenic bromate — Coca-Cola admitted defeat and withdrew 500,000 bottles of Dasani from UK shelves. The product has not been seen since.

As economist.com says, the extraordinary success of brands like Dasani and Aquafina in the US is, to many observers, “the ultimate proof that consumers are daft and easily manipulated by retailers to buy things they don’t need.” Or, as the journalist and satirist H L Mencken put it: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

I’ll drink (some tap water) to that.

To read more about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempts to persuade New Yorkers to kick their bottled water habit, click here (earlier diary entry on this topic).

This blog post was published on 4 August 2007