Ironic that Dasani should be in the water list: the brand was a complete and total *disaster* in the UK. Everybody thought it was hilarious that Coke was taking tap water, adding a few minerals, putting it in bottles and selling it at 3,000 times the price of the original water. The Trading Standards Authority started an investigation to determine whether it was misleading for Coke to claim that their water was `pure', when it was produced by a treatment process. And then it turned out that this process was turning perfectly safe tap water into something that sometimes contained more than twice the legal maximum amount of bromate. So, five weeks after its launch in early 2004, there was a massive product recall, the planned Europe-wide launch was cancelled and Dasani has never been seen in the UK since.
The `Dasani' brand name is total dirt here, to the extent that Coke would find it hard to sell bottled water under any name in the UK because everyone would be reminded of the Dasani fiasco. Even without the product recall, Dasani would be in people's minds as the `emperor's new clothes' of the 21st century. |
