A young African girl looks towards the camera, her back resting against an adobe mud wall. An open gutter runs behind her. Standing in the foreground is a rusted water pump. It is padlocked shut. Her three plastic jerry cans remain empty.



Former marketing executive, Duncan Goose, credits the photo – which appeared on page 18 in this newspaper on 15 December 2003 – as a catalyst for his bottled water brand One Water. The UK-based social enterprise pledges to donate all its profits towards providing clean water in the developing world. To date, it has given away over £10m.





“We need to find new ways to get people out of this cycle of living with contaminated water or no water at all”, says Goose, reflecting on the fact that an estimated 780m people still live without access to clean drinking water.



One Water, sold in superstores such as Tesco and Waitrose, is not alone. Other brands promising to channel revenues from bottled water sales back into water-related projects include Belu, Thirsty Planet, Life Water and the Co-op’s own brand Fairbourne Springs in the UK, as well as People Water and Starbucks-owned Ethos in the US.

The social contribution of these for-profit water brands is admirable. People Water, for instance, commits to generate one litre of “new water” for every litre sold. It says its ‘drop-for-drop’ model has helped secure over 5m gallons of clean water to communities. Belu’s commitment to pass on all its profits to WaterAid has delivered over £583,000 to the UK charity since 2011, benefiting nearly 40,000 people.

These pro-social business models are certainly generating benefits, but the ability of a small ethical bottled water firm to make a dent in the world’s water crisis is limited.



How can their impact be scaled up? The likes of Belu and One Water could increase their market share. Collectively, their portion of the $157bn (£94.7bn) global bottled water market is miniscule.

Unlike other more sophisticated product categories, quality is not the issue. The price points of ethical and mainstream brands are not especially divergent either (although brands like Belu target high-end trade). As for eco credentials, the sector’s smaller players frequently outperform their bigger rivals, often boasting progressive policies such as no water imports or ultra-lightweight packaging.



Invariably, the main barrier to growth keeps coming back to the cost of doing business, says Goose: “We’re up against companies like Nestlé and Danone that have global manufacturing capability and that can invest in customers in a way we can’t.”



Karen Lynch, chief executive at Belu, agrees. Without the multi-million pound marketing budgets of the big guns in the bottled water sector – namely, Nestlé, Danone, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo – it is an “uphill battle” to compete. “Why aren’t we leading the market? It’s purely about scale and investment”, she says.



The logical alternative is for the brands that dominate the bottled water market to take a steer from the sector’s ethical upstarts. The notion of giving back what you take is not such a new one after all. Shoe manufacturer Toms has been doing it for years. US spectacle brand Warby Parker pursues a similar “buy one give one” policy.





“I’m surprised that one of the bigger brands hasn’t made a bigger play on this”, says Giles Gibbons, founder of specialist consultancy Good Business and a social marketing expert. “‘One for one’ is definitely a big thing now … it’s so simple.”



As a marketing play, the idea is not entirely without precedent. Back in 2008, Danone’s Volvic brand promised to return the equivalent of 10 litres of clean water for every litre of bottled water sold. Yet the ‘Drink 1, Give 10’ campaign, which now focuses on rainforest protection, faced criticism In Germany for donating only $0.28 for every bottle sold. Similarly, critics have been quick to lambast Starbucks for giving away a mere $0.05 from the cost of a $1.80 bottle of Ethos water.



Such experiences have led big brands to rightly shy away from dubious cause-related marketing exercises. That’s not to say they don’t invest in charitable projects. Evian’s Water Protection Institute and Nestlé’s donation of water bottles to emergency relief groups demonstrate attempts – albeit relatively modest – to help.



The only bottled water brand vaguely comparable to those at the sector’s ethical end is Coca Cola. The US beverage has a “replenish” pledge that commits it to balance 100% of its sales volume by 2020 through water-related initiatives. “We are currently at 68% (2013 sales) through 509 projects in over 100 countries with hundreds of partners”, said a spokesperson for the company.



The world’s big bottled water brands could and should be doing more to help those without clean drinking water, and not just token efforts. It would eat into their profits but the stories of change could be truly remarkable.



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