Bärbel Unckrich Horizont
Why The Goodwins created a campaign for tap water
Tap water in the guise of a supposed premium brand: this idea may not be new, but it is definitely one that cannot be copied often enough. The latest campaign on this topic comes from The Goodwins and focuses on the environmentally friendly “Rohrquell”.
The fact is: tap water in Germany is not only inexpensive, but also meets the highest quality standards. Thanks to the German Drinking Water Ordinance, it is just as safe and often even of higher quality than bottled water on sale - even as supposed premium water. The non-profit association A Tip Tap, the advisory platform Co2online and the PuR project of the TU Berlin want to draw attention to these facts and present tap water as a healthy and environmentally friendly alternative to industrially bottled water with the cooperation project “Hemmungslos Trinkwasser”.
The Berlin-based creative agency has developed a social media campaign centered around the fictitious premium water brand “Rohrquell” and the claim “Naturally wet”. The team behind the campaign sees the campaign as an “affectionate satire of German bottled water” and wants to show how absurd bottled water consumption and its advertising can sometimes be.
“The campaign aims to encourage consumers to rethink their habits. With the call-to-action 'Tap water - drink more of it', it calls on people across Germany to drink tap water instead of buying bottled water. This is a simple, effective and cost-saving way for everyone to reduce their personal carbon footprint and make a contribution to climate protection,” explains Mirko Stolz, Managing Director Creative & Founder of The Goodwins.
The various assets can be seen on the social media channels of A Tip Tap and Co2online. Two different campaign motifs focus on the advantages of constant availability and waste avoidance. Like every product launch, Rohrquell also comes with an unboxing reel. In this tutorial, a (supposedly) well-known influencer presents the new “premium brand”. There is also fake merchandise with “Rohrquell” branding. As mentioned at the beginning, there have already been similar ideas. In 2013, for example, the Wiesbaden-based digital agency Scholz & Volkmer presented its own water brand 158 in stylish glass bottles. The number stands for the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that is saved with every three quarters of a liter of tap water compared to mineral water. That is, if the water does not have to be bottled in factories and transported to the customer. The “Hemmungslos Trinkwasser” initiative refers to similar figures. However, it calculates CO2 consumption in whole liters: On average, around 200 grams of CO2 are produced per liter of bottled water, caused by transport and packaging. Based on the annual per capita consumption of Germans, this amounts to 3 million tons of CO2 per year - a huge potential saving compared to the tap water available in every household.