Tag: Bottled Water

Mind the Gap (Something for something)

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

A reader emailed me with information on this entry from the BusinessToolsBlog, Donate to Charity with Your Mouse, Not your Wallet.  You click on links and the charities get money.  The reader asked me if I agreed that this was a promising way for people to get involved in and support organizations they might not know about – specifically because  people could support charities without much effort, and over time this would introduce them to the idea of being more philanthropic.

I’m torn about this. On one hand, there’s an economic value in just about everything you do online, so if someone wants to take that value and transfer it to charitable organizations I think that’s a very good thing.  And there is the distant possibility that by coming across one of these sites, someone might learn about a new organization and get involved in a more significant way.

But I’m unconvinced that this will open many people up to giving and to supporting organizations with their time and energy.  To the contrary, I worry that this reinforces the notion that you can get something for nothing, that change can come without effort and sacrifice.

This is the same hesitation I feel about the Gap’s Inspi(RED) t-shirts and other products that make donations to worthy causes – happy that the money is going to the cause; hopeful that the act of buying the shirts (or the water or the cereal) is educating people about and motivating them to act to support the cause; but worried that we might delude ourselves into thinking that this is enough – worried that buying the “responsible” shirt acts as a salve on our sense of responsibility to others, and worried that when doing something “good” becomes a fashion statement, we can loose sight of the impact in favor of the fashion.

And, by the way, here’s what the NY Times reported last February about the RED campaign:

In its March 2007 issue, Advertising Age magazine reported that Red companies had collectively spent as much as $100 million in advertising and raised only $18 million. Officials of the campaign said then that the companies had spent $50 million on advertising and that the amount raised was $25 million. Advertising Age stood by its article.

You see how tricky this gets once you get into the details.

It strikes me that buying is one thing, giving is another.  As long as they are complementary we’re in good shape.

But I worry they might be substitutes.

Even Fiji Water can be green?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

On my commute to work, while I was digging up information for my previous post on the oil we’re burning to make bottled water, I saw this ad for Fiji water, the #2 selling premium water in the U.S. Fiji seems to be the poster child for ridiculous when it comes to bottled water and the environment. The plastic bottles are made in China, the water comes from Fiji, and I get to buy one at Balducci’s in Manhattan for $2 a bottle.

According to Pablo Päster at Triple Pundit, it takes 7 times the amount of water in the Fiji water bottle to bring you the bottle, along with .9 liters of petroleum. Yet Fiji’s advertising is asking you to go to www.fijigreen.com to learn how environmentally conscious they are. Hmmm.

(If you’re interested in hearing Fiji’s side of the story, here’s an interview in U.S. news & World Report with Fiji’s Thomas Mooney, Sr Vice President for Sustainable Growth. His arguments about water replacing soda and their positive impact on the Fijian economy are both interesting, but a little beside the point on the environmental questions).

When I switched from the train to the subway, I found myself face-to-face with an Allstate ad that boasted about an Allstate employee who volunteers in schools. It just so happens that I’m an Allstate customer in the midst of filing a claim for a small flood in my kitchen, and what I care about is how and whether they will pay my claim; the fact that I have to dial “1” four times and then dial an extension to speak to a human being; and the fact that the person who cheerfully sold me my claim and wants to keep me as a customer has no formal role in deciding how I’m being treated. The point is that the Allstate employees’ volunteerism is irrelevant to me as a customer, and presumably irrelevant to someone choosing an insurance provider.

Yet this kind of “greenwashing” and publicizing a company’s good deeds is amazingly prevalent. I used to work in corporate citizenship at two Fortune 100 companies and got to interact with lots of other companies, and my experience is that some progress is being made but that the messaging is really getting ahead of changes in practices.

What amazes me most is that someone at Allstate (or Fiji) convinced someone to run these ads (I’m sure it had something to do with ‘brand attributes’). I guess any story will capture the imagination of a few customers, but when the story you’re telling is either opposed to (Fiji) or unrelated to (Allstate) what you do, it’s hard to imagine that this story is going to have much of an impact on anybody.

Would you like some petroleum with that Evian?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been running around with a factoid in my head, wondering if it’s true before I start repeating it. The factoid is that it takes a third of a bottle of petroleum to make and deliver a bottle of water.

I was told this about six months ago and hadn’t been able to check the facts until now. As far as I can tell, it is at most a small exaggeration. If you take manufacturing and delivery together, the number seems to be a quarter of a bottle according to Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute.

This is shocking, especially for a product that barely existed 10 years ago. Consumption of bottled water in the U.S. has increased fivefold in the last 10 years – from under 4 billion to more than 30 billion. Put another way, the average American has gone from having about a bottle of water once a month in 1997 to twice a week in 2007. That’s a seven-fold increase in a decade.

What’s crazy, of course, is that there’s a good substitute (tap water) out there, one with a huge infrastructure in place to distribute it right into our homes and places of work. This has all the makings of a habit we could all unlearn as quickly as we have learned, if the right message gets out.

Most of the vitriol that I’ve seen explaining why we shouldn’t drink bottled water centers on cost. It explains that bottled water can be 10,000 times more expensive than tap water to drink, and that bottled water costs more that gas (even at today’s high prices). I think these facts are interesting, but also “ho hum.” The mistake is that the anti-bottled water advocates are fighting a story with facts alone.

What’s missing from this approach is that a bottle of Evian (or Poland Spring, or Desani) is not the same thing as water from your tap. True, the quality of the water from a health perspective is essentially the same. But when you buy Evian, you’re buying the story of purity, the alps, clean mountain air, a story whose ultimate punchline is that at the most luxurious resorts, the poolboys come by and cool off the guests by spritzing them with spray bottles of…Evian. Add to that refrigeration, convenience, and habit and you understand why water and its offshoots are a big piece of Coca-Cola’s growth story these days (never mind that Dasani’s source is tap water).

So instead of dry facts that appeal to the head, why not fight a story with a story that hits people in the gut? How about taking something that’s on everyone’s mind these days – oil – and putting that at the center of the debate?

Making plastic bottles is oil-intensive: it took 17 million barrels of oil to make the 29 billion liters of bottled water Americans drank in 2006. That’s almost a full day’s worth of our nation’s annual oil consumption.

But I’m pretty sure even that idea won’t stick. So here’s my idea (and if anyone knows how I could get some donated billboard space near I-95 or Route 101 let me know):

Make a billboard with two bottles of water on a white background. The first bottle is filled with water, the second is one-quarter full of oil. Put an equals sign in between the bottles. Done.

(OK, it probably needs some snappy slogan like “Bring back the tap.” and a sentence saying, “This is how much oil it takes to bring you bottled water,” but I think all of that is incidental. The point is the powerful, simple, memorable image, one that’s worth talking about.)

If we want our advocacy to be as effective as the marketing that gets us to adopt bad habits, we have to be better at using marketers’ tools more effectively. Start with storytelling. I’m picking on bottled water but I’m sure you could come up with 10 other good examples. If you have some ideas, let me know.

Better yet, if you’re good with Photoshop, or know someone who is, ask them to make the image and send it to me, and I’ll use that to pitch the idea to Clear Channel Outdoor (who own all the billboards).

Notes for the skeptics:

1. According to the Earth Policy Institute, it takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce bottles for U.S. consumption. (Oddly, a recent NY Times article cited the Earth Policy Institute but quoted the number 1.5 million.)

2. If you are interested in this topic, check out the American Museum of Natural History water exhibit.

3. I was curious if I could get even close to Peter Gleick’s (of the Policy Institute) numbers using the information that’s being kicked around in the mainstream press. The bottom line is I could get to 10% as an oil:water ratio just for production of the bottles. I couldn’t get good information on transportation. Here’s the math for those who are interested:

a. 1 barrel of oil = 42 gallons = 158.987295 liters/barrel of oil

b. 17 million barrels of oil to produce water bottles = 2.7 billion liters of oil to produce 29 billion liters of water.

c. So just the production of the bottles means you could fill the bottle 10% with oil