Americans are now officially drinking more bottled water than carbonated sweetened beverages, or are expected to soon. What does that mean for the beverage industry? It means that PepsiCo is bringing its new premium water brand LIFEWTR and its infuriating name to the Super Bowl.
What does “premium” water mean, exactly? LIFEWTR is “purified water that is pH balanced with electrolytes,” which means regular water with some minerals added to it. More importantly for Pepsi, it means that the company will try to charge $2.70 for a liter of the stuff, while a liter of Pepsi’s Aquafina brand costs maybe half that much, depending on where you’re shopping.
The brand is an attempt to grab some of the market from Coca-Cola’s similarly priced brand, smartwater, because the main goal of these premium water brands is apparently to use non-standard capitalization that looks wrong written anywhere other than the product’s label.
Not that this is PepsiCo’s first time launching a colorless beverage during the Big Game. It was just 24 years ago that the company used a Super Bowl ad slot to introduce its new product, Crystal Pepsi. A cola without coloring or preservatives may have been consumers’ idea of a healthy soft drink in 1993, or maybe not, considering how the product flopped at the time.
There will still be plenty of beer commercials, though. And ads for other sweetened beverages. This is the Super Bowl, after all.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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