Krow

John Quarrey and team

When attempting to rebrand tap water, our biggest challenge lies in a deeply ingrained behavioural problem. People are constantly told that bottled water is better for them. Businesses are instructed that it’s cool to serve bottled water in meetings. To combat such social conditioning, we need to challenge people to re-evaluate their consumption of bottled alternatives to a free and natural product.

We propose a two-stage campaign; the first part dedicated to making people re-evaluate their consumption, through guerrilla marketing tactics. Eschewing traditional media would enable us to really get in people’s faces, forcing our targets to change their behaviour. We drew inspiration from the late Alan Fletcher, a graphic designer who subverted logos by playing around with product names. Here we’ve turned Evian into Naive, revealing the distorted ideas people have about bottled water. Highland Spring becomes Highway Robbery, pointing to the financial aspect of choosing tap water, and Volvic is changed to Vulgar, a reflection of the negative impact of bottled water on the environment. On the back of each product, we would have a short text explaining the arguments.

We would infiltrate supermarkets, planting our alternative bottles amid the original products on shelves. The press would be present to witness the reaction from the shop managers when they realised what had happened, thereby capitalising on free PR.

The second stage involves allowing people to drink tap water in situations where bottled options would be the norm. In the hot summer months, we would install vending machines with free samples and send vans around parks with bottles for people to help themselves to. When you ask for a glass of tap water at a bar, the server reluctantly moves to a shabby old sink. To combat this image, we would set up well-designed water bars with dispensers similar to beer taps that glisten with condensation. We are providing a different environment to that in which people are used to finding tap water. We favour a product that forces people to readdress their behaviour.

St Luke’s

The creative team

The fundamental point of our campaign is to make people question their actions and realise how ludicrous it is to pay through the nose for something that is free and readily available. Rather than highlighting the environmental damage caused by bottled water, we are concentrating on the financial incentive of opting for the option from the tap.

Our tactics would centre around a PR stunt in which distributors would be situated at train and Tube stations across London, giving away what would initially appear to be free bottles of water. The product would be called Mineral Air, and on the back of the plastic bottle there would be a list of five frequently asked questions demonstrating the ridiculous nature of buying into such a product, for example: Q) Is mineral air better for you than normal air? A) No. But neither is drinking mineral water. Yet everyone feels as if they’re doing themselves some good. This tactic would be followed up with a host of adverts backing up these points. The aim of such a campaign is to draw people towards a sensible conclusion, rather than filling them with facts and figures. It’s true that most water is transported from far-flung regions, packaged and repackaged for transportation, and it costs a bomb. But people are constantly bombarded with information about how their actions are damaging the world, to the extent that they switch off. Therefore, we intend to make the point that through re-evaluating automatic behavioural patterns, we can save ourselves cash, and protest against the effect of marketing and the way it makes people think, or prevents them from thinking for themselves.

Though our intention is to mini-malise negative impact on the environment, we would focus our campaign on the financial benefit of choosing tap water.

Weider & Kennedy

Planner: Matt Boffey

We wanted to talk about how good tap water is rather than focus on the damage bottled water does. It’s quite easy to shock people but it’s always with negatives: “this is bad; cut that out; stop doing that”. We wanted to lead with something positive instead. There are so many different brands and products trying to boost their environmental credentials that another green message can get lost.

The images we’ve chosen are quite small and fit easily on the page but our thinking on how to convince people to drop bottled water doesn’t reduce down quite so easily. Firstly, tap water tastes really good and tastes different in different regions. It would be a good idea to get people to appreciate the flavour of tap water – imagine a television programme in which Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall travels around the UK tasting different tap waters. That would make you think there’s something worth having inside that tap that you take for granted. Tap water is also fresh every day. Why would you choose pre-packed over fresh? And looking at the filtration techniques, it seems that the standard for tap water is higher than it is for bottled water. People are becoming cynical about environmental messages, and many people are cynical about advertising, so restricting the benefits of tap water to an advert might get the wrong reaction. It would be better to do something a bit more engaging like a television show, or some sort of tasting experience. I’m not sure who would stump up the money for this, though. Would it be the Government or the private water companies – considering they’re so unconcerned about fixing the leaks in their own pipes!

TBWA London

Planner: Tom Sanders

There were essentially two directions that we could have chosen. One was to demonise bottled water – making people feel stupid for paying for it or guilty about the environmental implications of it – and the other was to eulogise tap water. At TBWA, we look at what the conventions on a category are and try to go against those, so we decided not to slag off bottled water. Simply lambasting bottled water would be like a stop-smoking campaign, which ultimately turns lots of people off because you are telling them what to do. In terms of execution, therefore, it’s a fairly simple image of a bottle of water with a gold tap on top, which associates tap water with the quality people think bottled water offers, with the strapline, “Bottled water is as good as gold.” It is trying to force the purchaser to reconsider what exactly they’re buying and why they need to buy it.

In the long run, we would work with the tap as a symbol of quality. The idea of going up to a tap and putting your mouth to it is often seen as a bit grubby, but we want to make tap water heroic, so it becomes a badge of pride and a status symbol. The tap is gold to give it the kudos it deserves and to help change people’s perceptions. I would look to do a lot of non-traditional advertising, such as painting taps gold around Britain, to root the symbol of a gold tap in people’s lives as much as possible.

The challenge here is not to make people think differently about water in their own home, but when they’re out and about. That’s the real behaviour change we need – it’s about the times in our life when water isn’t as accessible as it is at home.

Lunar

Creatives: Laurent Simon & Aidan McClure

To quote Bob Geldof: “Bottled water is bollocks.” It’s one of the great marketing myths of the 20th century. The wet stuff found in 500ml plastic bottles is no purer, healthier or tastier than the wet stuff that runs freely from our taps. Yet we’ll pay a thousand times more to have it carted halfway round the world. And all along we’ve got the world’s best drinking water right here in Britain. On tap.

The problem is the image not the product. In the aquatic beauty test, bottled water has it wrapped up: it’s a choice, a lifestyle. But the nature of its appeal could also be its Achilles’ heel. What if you could turn that lifestyle on its head and present a more attractive alternative? In 2007, tap water has become the drink of the socially responsible, and bottled water the drink of the irresponsible. The idea is very simple: the average Briton buys 33 plastic bottles of water a year; we need to get them to buy only one bottle and refill it each time. The challenge is how to convert an everyday reflex – turning on the tap – into an active protest or positive action. The smart bit is really just inventing packaging for tap water and using that package as a statement, as media itself.

We would create a brand of eco-friendly water bottles called Refill. Celebrities, designers and artists could endorse tap water by designing artwork for the bottles. All communication would direct people to the web-site www.refill.co.uk. That’s where people could design and and create their own bespoke water bottle. The water bottles would be something people would want to keep, and most importantly, reuse.