Name: 為什麼在英國買不到大山尼水？ (Why You Can't Buy Dasani Water in Britain)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:36:46.000Z
Duration: 9 min 51 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

This is a bottle of Dasani, Coca-Cola's brand of bottled water.

情態副詞

and then had tiny amounts of minerals deliberately added back into it.

This is a British Dasani bottle from 2004,

which was the first and last time that you could ever buy Dasani water in the UK.

is one of the greatest marketing disaster stories in history.

But it wasn't until I started researching,

searching through newspapers and TV shows from 2004,

that I found that the tale is a little more complicated than I thought.

And a little more complicated than a lot of the world thought.

"bottled water" was something expensive that got ordered at fancy restaurants,

that it had started to become a thing that everyday people might want to buy.

On Christmas Day, 1992, British sitcom 'Only Fools and Horses' made fun of that trend

by having its main character, lovable rogue Del Boy,

sell tap water from South London as "Peckham Spring" bottled water.

It's a slow and old-fashioned comedy by today's standards,

you're two-thirds of the way through before anyone actually starts bottling water,

but because it was the Christmas Day episode in 1992,

back when most British households only had four channels of television,

that show was watched by more than 20 million people,

more than a third of the entire British population.

And the final joke of that episode is that the water is contaminated

by some chemical barrels that Del Boy dumped in a local pond in the first act.

It is, to be fair, a brilliant closing gag.

And it's one that stuck in the British psyche.

The BBC reran the episode another five times in the years after.

It'll have been on cable and satellite channels many more times than that.

I would guess that by 2004 when Dasani launched, about half of the country, maybe more,

could understand "Peckham Spring" as a reference,

or at least remembered that time Del Boy tried to bottle tap water.

Now, under UK law, "mineral water" is a protected term.

Mineral water must come from a certified underground spring,

it must not be chemically treated in any way,

And back in 2004, the perception was that bottled water meant mineral water.

Why else would you buy it? It's something you can't get at home.

Over in America, though, the home of Coca-Cola,

was that it was just that: it was water, in a bottle.

You were paying for the convenience, and the taste,

and it didn't really matter whether that came from the ground

To be fair, there are large parts of America where the tap water does not taste or smell good,

and their federal standards aren't great, particularly compared to Europe.

And anyone who's ever taken a vacation to Disney World, for example,

will know that the tap water around Orlando can smell a little... sulphur-y.

But in the UK, the perception was different:

you were buying "mineral water" because it was natural,

[car horn] it had been filtered through rocks for eons,

it was classier and fancier and, perhaps, healthier that what came out of your tap.

we have some of the safest tap water in the world and did back then too,

and the idea was that bottled water was filtered and pure straight from the Earth,

Coca-Cola were trying to introduce an American-style filtered tap water

Now, they were not lying about their water.

Their marketing didn't use the phrase "tap water",

they preferred "purified water", but they weren't lying.

their process "precisely delivers pure still water".

The public might have assumed it was mineral water,

In fact, what they had done is spend a long time with focus groups,

taste-testing and refining the mineral balance and the flavour of the water,

making a version of Dasani that was ideal for the British palate.

Dasani launched with the first stage of what was going to be

a £7million advertising campaign on February 10, 2004.

The British public either didn't notice or didn't care that it was tap water,

just the way Americans don't seem to care.

There were occasional rough patches for the launch, like shopkeepers in Buxton,

complaining about being forced by their contracts with Coca-Cola

to replace bottles of the local water in coolers with Dasani.

Or the regulators launching an investigation

into whether Coca-Cola should be using the word "pure" on the label.

A lot of articles written more recently claim that Coca-Cola's first blunder

was copying an American Dasani slogan, "can't live without spunk" --

which has a very different meaning in the UK.

The only actual evidence I could find of that slogan is a screenshot

on one tech news web site that liked innuendo.

It looks a web designer reused some American ad images

in one part of a Flash-based web site that almost no-one saw.

No other article from the time, that I can find, anyway, mentions that slogan at all.

Y'know, the advertising was put together by Coca-Cola's UK division: they're not stupid.

In fact, the advertising team was probably breathing a sigh of relief.

All things considered, the launch had been successful.

And then it all went wrong, very very quickly.