
Looking out across the sea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending and outreach these days, one thing is obvious: If you’re a global brand, water has become the cause célèbre. Because of its role as a basic need (to which many of the world’s poor still don’t have access) and its simplicity, water is easy to get your mind around and is relatively easy to incorporate into cause-related marketing programs. At the other end of the spectrum, water has become a designer product – witness the success of Fiji and other high-end water brands.
Now, the high-profile push by Starbucks with its Ethos water brand represents a new course in the use of water as a socially responsible vehicle. The Ethos campaign is showing how the savvy retailer is preparing to build Ethos into a visible and lasting social investment brand – one that can be leveraged to go “beyond water” and perhaps include other products, thus taking the company into new areas of social investment.
Ethos, which was created in 2002 by two socially responsible entrepreneurs, was purchased by Starbucks in April of 2005. Starbucks will use sales of Ethos water to donate $10 million over the next five years for clean water sources in developing countries. But the brand has much wider implications for Starbucks – as one of the cofounders of Ethos, Peter Thum states, “Ethos is more like a mission with a product versus the other way around.” This philosophy and Starbucks’ promotion of the brand Ethos are clever moves as the water-for-good phenomenon becomes a crowded field.
Most water-aid programs began as grass-roots campaigns championed by nonprofits such as Water Aid (water-aid) and global organizations such as the United Nations. But water has taken on a different hue as it has become a consumer and lifestyle product. The big drinks players – among them Coca-Cola (“Make Every Drop Count”), Schweppes (African community-based water programs), Unilever (extensive water programs around the world), Dannon and Nestlé (Agrivair) – all have numerous water products. So the attractiveness of the simple water-for-life message has appealed to them all.
U.S. companies are now aggressively integrating their water brands with corporate social responsibility. Procter & Gamble, for example, is leveraging its PUR brand in a campaign to promote “Children’s Safe Drinking Water.” The company collaborated with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to develop a low-cost technology called “PUR Purifier of Water,” which purifies contaminated drinking water to meet World Health Organization standards for safe drinking water.
Starbucks, however, is taking a different approach in that its Ethos water launch is just a stepping stone in creating a strong, highly recognized global CSR brand. Starbucks clearly sees water as a no-brainer when it comes to making the all-important connection between the company, the issue, and the consumer, but it also anticipates that its Ethos brand will do much more than just address some of the world’s crucial water issues. The concept of owning a global CSR brand (as BP has done with “Beyond Petroleum”) will be watched closely.