Dasani by Coca-Cola Wins 2007 International Bad Products Award

Consumers International – Press Briefing

October 30, 2007

Luke Upchurch +44 796 894 9327

2007 International Bad Products Award Winner    

Dasani by Coca-Cola

Award: Bad Drinks Marketing

Company: Coca-Cola

Action: Repackaging Tap Water

Coca- Cola is undoubtedly one of the most recognized and successful brands on the planet, but even they have pushed marketing into the realms of the ridiculous with their international bottled water – Dasani. In 2004, Coca-Cola was forced to take Dasani, off the UK shelves after a public outcry because it contained nothing more than tap water. As a result it’s never made it to German or French shops. But sales of Dasani are still rising in the US and it is being strongly promoted in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and several other Latin American countries.

Coca-Cola itself says that Dasani isn’t spring water and that it is sourced from local tap water supplies. But from its marketing and packaging, one could easily think otherwise. Dasani promotional material gushes with terms like: ‘Filtered for purity using state of the art processes’ and ‘enhanced with a special blend of minerals for a pure, crisp, fresh taste’ What it doesn’t say quite as loudly is that Dasani comes from the same local municipal reservoirs as the water out of

the tap. Coca-Cola is not doing anything illegal, but advertising which suggests their bottled water is significantly superior to local tap water is misleading. They are simply repackaging in plastic containers a common resource and charging consumers hundreds to thousands of times what it would cost out of the tap.

Consumers International says:

‘Sustainable access to essential services, such as water, is a basic consumer right. By bottling up this universal resource to sell back to us, corporations, such as Coca-Cola have created a US$100 billion industry at a time when one billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. Making profits out of increasingly fragile water supplies is unsustainable, irresponsible and against the basic rights of consumers everywhere.’