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July 9, 2009

Bottled Brand Naming: A Broken Brand Promise

Bottled water looks set to be a casualty of the recession. Sales have flat-lined since 2007 and nosedived since the crash.

It is easy to see why: bottled water is a purchase that one can easily forgo, not least because more and more studies are showing that (free) tap water is just as good, or even better.

Now, the Government Accountability Office and the Environmental Working Group are pushing Congress to have bottled waters labeled with the same information that consumers can get about tap water. Different regulation laws have meant that bottled water is actually less regulated than the stuff coming out of your faucet.

The International Bottle Water Association, for its part, claims that its product is safe, but it still seems as if they will have to disclose more about their product than their soft drink/iced tea competitors. And additional standards should apply for claims that the water is "purified" or "spring water."

This is important, since a whopping 25% of the bottled water sold to you comes from municipal sources, like the tap. More research has even shown that 10 popular brands of bottled water purchased from a grocery store contained pollutants - an average of "8 contaminants in each brand."

Dr. Peter Gleick says that "The labels on bottled water in the United States are a combination of disinformation, misinformation, and no information."

More than that, bottled water brand naming, because it is totally unregulated, can be misleading. As Gleick says, "We thus have "Yosemite" bottled water from a municipal source in Los Angeles, "Everest" water from Texas, and all sorts of "Arctic" or "Glacier" brand waters from Florida and other places about as far removed from the Arctic or glaciers as one can get."

It has been quite clear for some time that bottled water companies have not been held accountable for the brand promises they make to the consumer with the product names they place on their labels.

Congress is simply taking a step towards ensuring all of us that when it comes to "spring water," we given enough information to understand what we are really paying for.

Technorati Tags: Bottled Water, Bottled Water Regulations, Bottled Water Naming, Brand Promise

Posted by William Lozito at July 9, 2009 8:43 AM
Posted to Beverages | Brand Naming | Branding | Industry | Marketing | Naming | Product Naming

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