Scott R. Sullivan

June 30th, 2008 by Scott

I’ve agreed with this for the longest time, always laughing at those who had to drink “spring” water, which more often than not is just “filtered” water.

It is obviously a fad created by marketers, in much the same way that music is manufactured and marketed and global warming is marketed.

Just read this clip from the Washington Post today:

Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as “concentrated water” — at $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to . . . water.

And from Tennessee, a company named BlingH2O — whose marketing imagery features a mostly nude model improbably balancing a bottle of water between her heel and her hip — is retailing its water at $40 for 750 milliliters, with special-edition bottles going for $480 — more than a million times the price of the liquid that comes from your tap.

The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.

But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown that both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.

Experts who study bottled water as a cultural phenomenon say differences between the two are largely marketing inventions.(Source)

In fact, if you look at most spring water bottles, you’ll see that it actually says “filtered” not spring. And we have all heard the anagram for the famous bottled water Evian. Naive.

I’ll close with this clip from Penn and Teller’s show, BS:

via videosift.com