Fighting a Flood of Bottled Water

Can you brand something as common as tap water? Two New York-area marketing consultants began a campaign to do just that in the latter half of last year. They’ve had so much success that what started out as a labor of love run out of their homes now threatens to turn into a full-time job.

And that’s okay for Eric Yaverbaum and Mark DiMassimo, two veterans of the New York marketing scene who decided to fight the bottled-water industry by juicing up the green appeal of the humble H20 that comes from the faucet. “We’re brand guys,” says Yaverbaum, the president of strategic PR agency Ericho Communications; DiMassimo co-founded the DIGO brand-building agency. “We’ve always worked for other people’s products. Now we’ve got a company, and we’re our own client. It makes the strategy sessions move a lot faster, that’s for sure.”

The pair started last October with a Web site, www.Tappening.com, that outlines extensive reasons why tap water is more eco-friendly than bottled water, including a smaller carbon manufacturing footprint, savings in transport costs, reduced landfill use, and the simple fact that the Environmental Protection Agency’s purity requirements for municipal water are more stringent than those the Food and Drug Administration imposes on bottled water.

The Web site also offered reusable plastic water bottles in blue or green for $14.95, with the slogans “What’s Tappening?” and “Think Global, Drink Local” on their sides. And that’s where Yaverbaum and Di Massimo started to flex their promotional muscles. They got the bottle mentioned on a number of shopping-trend and green lifestyle blogs and Web sites, did local media in the New York market, and sent bottles to photo-friendly celebrities such as Cameron Diaz, Eva Longoria and Scarlet Johanssen.

The result: Tappening’s first batch of 39,000 bottles—meant to last through the holiday season-- sold out within 36 hours. Tappening.com now has a second shipment of 100,000 bottles in stock and also offers a stainless-steel model for $17.95. That’s probably a good thing, since the first “Good Morning America” show of 2008 featured the reusable bottle in a segment on hot trends. Meanwhile, the Web site has received more than a million visits.

The proceeds from those bottle sales will help defray the costs of distributing and selling a documentary, “Garbage! The Revolution Begins at Home”, a film that traces three months’ of household waste produced by an average suburban family. “Beyond that, we’re not opposed to earning a buck, but that’s not our main purpose,” Yaverbaum says.

Next on the agenda is a campaign to send one million messages in bottles to Muhter Kent, the new incoming CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, expected to take up his post in July. The messages, which can be e-mailed to Tappening.com from the Web site, are all meant to contain pledges to stop buying store-marketed water brands such as Coke’s Dasani and to drink only tap water.

Both Coke and Pepsi make no bones about the fact that their bottled water brands use tap water. But while Pepsi’s Aquafina agreed to put “PWS” (for “public water source”) on its label last year, Dasani is resisting that labeling push. Both companies are currently mounting a number of eco-friendly initiatives including packaging changes they say have reduced the landfill impact of their products.

But changing the label or even the packaging won’t solve the resource problem posed by store-bought water, Yaverbaum says. “The current rate of recycling for bottled water containers is around 23%,” he says. “Even if you could get that up to 40%, that’s still a lot of plastic going into landfills. And then there’s the fossil fuel required to ship all that product.” He says the messages will also be posted on the Tappening.com Web site.

Making tap water hip might help stem the swiftly rising tide of bottled water consumption. In 1980 the average American consumed 2.7 gallons of bottled water annually; that level grew to 8.8 gallons by 1990, hit 16.7 gallons in 2000 and reached a high-water mark of almost 30 gallons last year.

Tappening.com’s cause may also be in line for a boost from efforts of local governments. San Francisco, St. Louis and other cities have placed restrictions on bottled-water purchases by their municipal agencies. And this month Chicago became the first U.S. city to put in force a sales tax specifically on bottled water purchases: 5 cents per plastic container.