The Daily Mail renamed the brand 'Eau de Sidcup' and compared its provenance to that of an episode of Only Fools and Horses in which Del Boy tries to sell Peckham tap water to unsuspecting punters. The Sun referred to the scandal as 'The Real Sting', and The Times expertly concluded that Coca-Cola "had got itself into one of the worst product crisis management scenarios for years - one which could cost the Atlanta giant up to $2bn".
Coca-Cola is not going to lose billions and it has not been performing some kind of 'sting' on the public. While the Dasani saga does indeed offer us interesting marketing insights, as usual they are not the ones being offered to us by the mass media.
Dasani is a semantic confection. Most brands are. It is impossible for consumers to distinguish between Dasani and any other brand of mineral or tap water. Whether it comes from a French mountain, a Swedish glacier or a Sidcup tap is unimportant. It all tastes the same. Blindfold any consumer and they would be hard pushed to tell the difference between their preferred brand of mineral water and their own bath water, provided both were served at the same temperature.
But so what? People don't buy water for the taste, they buy it for the brand associations. Consumers will never admit or indeed realise that they chose brands because of the image. They believe that they choose bottled water because of the taste. But as marketers we know the truth.
The problem with Dasani isn't that it comes from tap water, the problem is that its brand has been revealed as a confection. The mask has slipped and the brand is dead.
All brands taste the same. Take beer for example. Last year I made a programme with the BBC in which we spent an evening with lager drinkers who usually refused to drink any other brand but their favourite. We then proved that not a single lager loyalist could actually identify their preferred brand in a blind taste test.
A similar situation applies to wine; 90 per cent of 'wine lovers' can't tell the difference between red and white when blindfolded, never mind which chateau it came from. All coffee also tastes the same in blind taste tests, until you add a brand name. Then suddenly it will be preferred by 60% of tasters. Why? Because brand associations, not product performance, drive purchase intention.
The real stories behind the Dasani saga are far more interesting. The first is about how marketing at Coca-Cola has been weak for decades, that its strategic zenith was about 65 years ago and it has been trading on it ever since. The second is about how the media loves beating up on global brands such as Coke and how brand prominence sometimes carries negative as well as positive implications. And the third story is about how a bunch of local consumers from Buxton could bring down a multi-national marketing machine with a few well-placed comments to the local press. Now that's interesting.
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