The water fashion dries up
If the global recession has done one thing it is to puncture the fad for drinking bottled water. Consumers in developed countries have rediscovered the tap.
Two decades ago, if anyone had suggested bottled water would be the must-have accessory of the western world you’d have thought your leg was being pulled. Don’t underestimate the power of fashion however, especially when marketing men give the bandwagon a push.
Consumers who complain about paying £1.20 a litre for petrol think nothing of paying more than that for water. They are both natural liquids extracted from the ground for free: the oil requires processing and refining, however, and has a price inflated by taxes - water has no such costs or excuses.
Yet nations have been transformed into people who must carry a bottle as tightly as a hobo hangs onto his tin of strong lager. Only a generation ago the public could go from one mealtime to the next without consuming liquid: today people cannot go for five minutes without a swig. The fashion has changed culture: it is now acceptable to drink (from the bottle, of course) on the street or on public transport; bottles are carried to meetings alongside BlackBerries or mobiles. Water has replaced cigarettes as the acceptable intrusion.
But the volume of bottled water sales in the UK has fallen by 4.7 per cent over the past year. Sales are down even further at 5.1 per cent, suggesting consumers are trading down. For some brands the fall is over 7 per cent. In the US, growth in the market dropped from 21 per cent in 2006 to 11 per cent last year and has now stalled.
So water is behaving exactly as a non-necessity would in a recession. Consumers whose disposable income has been squeezed by other rising costs have decided they would rather fill the petrol tank and the fridge than buy water. The demand curve has proved more elastic than the bottlers thought.
The question is whether sales will revive when world economies pick up, or whether a new personal fashion will take over and bottled water will be sooo 2000’s. As anachronistic as tank-tops, yuppie braces or a slice of lime in your beer bottle.
