So You Think You Know It All: A compendium of extremely interesting and slightly strange true stories. The Show One
show closed within weeks, costing Bart his personal fortune and leading eventually to his bankruptcy.
IT’S NOT THE REAL THING
Coca-Cola is the best-selling soft drink in the world, and the world’s biggest soft drinks company, so how did they make what some industry experts reckon was one of the biggest marketing cockups of all time?
Instantly recognisable, Coca-Cola had triumphed thanks to slick marketing creating one of the most successful companies in the world, with a back catalogue of expensive and highly produced advertising campaigns. But the biggest marketing arsenal in the world is no defence when public tastes change. In the late 1990s Coke sales had begun to plateau as consumers turned their attention to healthier alternatives, like bottled water.
In 1999 Coke launched their own bottled water brand called Dasani. They’d been pipped to the post some five years earlier by their number one rival PepsiCo, whose bottled water brand was called Aquafina. But Dasani quickly became the second most popular brand of water in the USA. Coke looked to Europe and the UK, certain they could repeat the success. Britain alone presented a very tempting market to dive into – sales of bottled water here had grown by nearly 50 per cent between 2000 and 2004.
So it was that in February 2004 Coke’s waters broke in the UK. Dasani, baptised with a £7 million marketing splash, steamed onto the supermarket shelves.
But one man was about to muddy the waters.
In 2004 Graham Hiscott, now business editor at the Daily Mirror, was a journalist for the Associated Press news agency. He was leafing through The Grocer – the venerable magazine of the food and drink industry – and came across an article about the launch of Dasani. It was a straightforward piece, but one sentence leapt out, describing Dasani as ‘mineral enhanced… tap water’. Graham could taste a story.
The perception of mineral water in the UK and Europe is that it’s drawn from a remote natural spring or a bubbling mountainside brook – not, as the Dasani story revealed, a tap in a depot in the southeast London suburb of Sidcup. Coke never made explicit claims that their water had been pumped from a mountain stream by cherubs and fairies – but their constant claims of its being purer-than-pure suggested some effort had gone to source it.
The natural, honest-to-goodness image of Dasani was sullied. And then someone worked out Coke’s profit margin. Dasani sold for 95p per bottle, each only 500ml (17fl oz). Thames Water, the original source of the contents via a tap, charged (at the time) 0.03p per 500ml. That’s a markup of more than 3,000 per cent. To the untrained, un-business, savvy eye of the consumer, it looked as if Coke were taking the p***. Fate, of course, then arranged for swathes of Surbiton to be flooded by a burst water main, the very same water main supplying the Dasani plant.
Consumers felt let down by a household brand name, and that ensured the story ran and ran. ‘It was only really when you began to get the public anger [that] you realised that this was a great story and Coke had made a colossal mistake,’ said Graham.
But even as they were fighting one media storm about the source of Dasani, another broke out just three weeks later. In the process of turning tap water into Dasani, calcium chloride was added for ‘taste profile’, and then ozone pumped through. The problem was that the batch of calcium chloride used had been contaminated with bromide, and the added ozone then oxidised it, transforming it into bromate, a nasty carcinogen. By the time Dasani was on the shelves, it contained 22 mg (0.0007/m) of bromate, twice the legal limit. Her Majesty’s Drinking Water Inspectorate constantly monitor tap water for bromate levels and by coincidence had tested the Thames Water being supplied to the factory at around the same time Dasani was launched, finding it free of bromate. So Dasani, the health-giving pure water, was actually just Thames Water to which Coke had added a carcinogenic chemical.
Coke immediately called back the half a million bottles already dispatched to retailers, and this recall is thought to have postponed the introduction of the water to the rest of Europe.
All in, the blunder was reported to have cost Coke in the region of £40 million.
It was like watching a slow-motion PR car crash, recalls marketing expert Allyson Stuart-Allen:
‘There was a 3,000 per cent mark up on Dasani. Now on the one hand you could say, “Wow, that’s fantastic marketing.” On the other hand, you have to defend that price position and to defend it you have to be more than just a purified water, you have to be something else.’
Coke argued that Dasani did have ‘something else’, but exactly what that was had been misunderstood. It wasn’t simply tap water; it was the result of a ‘highly sophisticated process’ developed by NASA to create the purest drinking water you could get. In reality, though, the process, known as reverse osmosis, was already a common way of purifying water, and featured in consumer household water purification systems, having been developed without the aid of the US Space Agency. Things were starting to feel desperate.
How does a $45 billion company make such a hash of a drink of water? Says Allyson, ‘With that sort of power comes a lot of hubris sometimes. Consumers are not foolish. They do know what’s going on and they will find you out.’
I’M BACKING PORTUGAL BRITAIN
Grassroots campaigns are often heartfelt, but they have a habit of being strangled by weeds (and spotlight-craving politicians).
It’s 1967. Britain is swinging. And so is the economy – at the end of a rope. With inflation rocketing and foreign exports tanking, Harold Wilson’s government have had to devalue the pound by 14 per cent to be in with a hope of competing with European imports. It’s humiliating for Wilson as he pleads no alternative to boosting output.
But five secretaries from plumbing manufacturers Colt Ventilation and Heating Ltd, in Surbiton, have a cunning plan…
On 27 December ‘the girls of the typing pool’ composed a collective letter to their boss offering to work an extra half-hour a day, for free, to do their bit for the economy and British-made products. ‘We’re Backing Britain,’ they typed, in the process coining a pretty marvellous, media-friendly, rallying cry. The management didn’t need persuading to take an offer of free labour (what management would?) and the week between Christmas and New Year being traditionally slow in terms of news, the story was a belated gift to the tabloids. So enthusiastic were the columnists and features writers who picked it up from the newsdesk that by mid-January 1968, 3,000 companies had announced that their workers were pledging to skip tea breaks to improve productivity.
Initially the movement was spontaneous and homespun so, naturally, politicians wondered what they might get out of it. Ted Heath, the Tory (and opposition) leader, hopped on the bandwagon followed by Prime Minister Wilson. Business leaders weren’t far behind. Publisher Robert Maxwell launched a simultaneous Buy British campaign. He was passionate about all this, he said, failing to disclose that all the books he published were printed in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, the trade unions warned that the campaign was just a smokescreen for unpaid overtime. But that fell on deaf ears. And so, thankfully, did Bruce Forsyth’s excruciatingly naff – but very catchy – single ‘I’m Backing Britain’. It was rushed out to fanfare the movement and, in the spirit of things, everyone involved, including Bruce, made it for a reduced fee. It sold 7,300 copies and failed to chart.
Economically, experts said, the campaign was woefully naïve. It simply didn’t add up. But for a brief moment it did have a bit of Dunkirk spirit, a feeling that the nation was pulling together and enjoying a collective experience not felt since, well, Dunkirk.
Badges, stickers and T-shirts were everywhere and festooned everything for the first months of 1968. London wholesaler Scott Lester ordered thousands of white T-shirts screen-printed with the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ slogan. But, it turned out, the shirts had been made in Portugal. Lester said, ‘We can’t find a British T-shirt which will give us the same quality at a price which will compare.’ D’oh!
‘I’m Backing Britain’ disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived. The slogan remains in parlance