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How an industry began
Still, we needed help learning to drink bottled water. For that, we can thank the French.Gustave Leven was the chairman of Source Perrier when he approached an American named Bruce Nevins in 1976. Nevins was working for athletic-wear company Pony. Leven was a major Pony investor.
"He wanted me to consider the water business in the U.S.," Nevins says. "I was a bit reluctant."
Back then, the American water industry was small and fusty, built on home and office delivery of big bottles and grocery sales of gallon jugs.
Nevins looked out across 1970s America, though, and had an epiphany: Perrier wasn't just water. It was a beverage. The opportunity was in persuading people to drink Perrier when they would otherwise have had a cocktail or a Coke. Americans were already drinking 30 gallons of soft drinks each a year, and the three-martini lunch was increasingly viewed as a problem. Nevins saw a niche.
From the start, Nevins pioneered a three-part strategy. First, he connected bottled water to exclusivity: In 1977, just before Perrier's U.S. launch, he flew 60 journalists to France to visit "the source," where Perrier bubbled out of the ground. He connected Perrier to health, sponsoring the New York City Marathon, just as long-distance running was exploding as a fad across America. And he associated Perrier with celebrity, launching it with $4 million in TV commercials featuring actor-director Orson Welles.
Nevins' strategy worked. In 1978, its first full year in the United States, Perrier sold $20 million of water. The next year, sales tripled to $60 million.
What made Perrier distinctive was that it was a sparkling water, served in a signature glass bottle. But that's also what left the door open for Evian, which came to the United States in 1984. Evian's U.S. marketing was built around images of toned young men and women in tight clothes sweating at a gym. Madonna drank Evian -- often onstage at concerts.
"If you were cool, you were drinking bottled water," says Ed Slade, who became Evian's vice president of marketing in 1990. "It was a status symbol."
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Evian was also a still water, which Americans prefer, and it was the first to offer a plastic bottle nationwide. The clear bottle allowed us to see the water -- how clean and refreshing it looked on the shelf.
Americans have never wanted water in cans, which suggest a tinny aftertaste before you even take a sip. The plastic bottle, in fact, did for water what the pop-top can had done for soda: It turned water into an anywhere, anytime beverage, at just the moment when we decided we wanted a beverage, everywhere, all the time.
An alignment of convenience and virtue
Perrier and Evian launched the bottled-water business just as it would prove irresistible. Two-career families, over-programmed children, prepared foods in place of home-cooked meals, the constant urging to eat more healthfully and drink less alcohol -- all reinforce the value of bottled water. But those trends also reinforce the mythology.We buy bottled water because we think it's healthy. Which it is, of course: Every 12-year-old who buys a bottle of water from a vending machine instead of a 16-ounce Coke is inarguably making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn't healthier, or safer, than tap water in American homes.
Indeed, while the United States is the single biggest consumer in the world's $50 billion bottled-water market, it is the only one of the top four -- the others are Brazil, China and Mexico -- with nearly universally reliable tap water.
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Tap water versus bottled waterKatie Couric talks with Ronni Sandroff of Consumer Reports about whether water that you buy is better than what you can get free from the tap.
Tap water in the U.S., with rare exceptions, is impressively safe. It is monitored constantly, and the test results are made public. Mineral water has a long association with medicinal benefits -- and it can provide minerals that people need -- but there are no scientific studies establishing that routinely consuming mineral water improves your health. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in fact, forbids mineral waters in the United States from making any health claims.
For this healthful convenience, we're paying what amounts to an unbelievable premium. You can buy a half-liter Evian for $1.35 -- 17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren't paying attention.
In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from Yosemite National Park. It's so good the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, five months and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
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