FIJI Water – Product Branding
Stephanie Montoya
330 Marketing
David Kalicharan
November 10, 2008
With so many brands of bottled water on the market today, coming up with the right product branding is the key to elevating the status of a “bottle of water” to a brand that is a necessity of life. In this paper we will explore why FIJI Water’s product branding is the right product branding.
I had never tried FIJI Water before. For this research I bought a 1 Liter bottle, from a local grocery store, for $1.79. Six out of six Montoyas agreed it was a dang good bottle of water. (This summation is from a group of people who have had the unpleasant experience of drinking Red Rock bottled water, which tasted just like rocks.) What do people think they are really buying when purchasing FIJI Water? Is it prestige, purity, a fountain of youth, perhaps it’s the promise of something exotic, the thought of an escape, may be? The packaging alone has the feel of a far off exotic island. The fact is that what people are really buying, the core benefit, is a “thirst quencher”.
To sell this thirst quencher, the marketing team had to develop a product that could more than compete in the glutted bottled water market. The actual product, in the case of FIJI Water, is a very attractive bottle of water that is easily discernable by its unique square design. The marketers took many extra steps to call attention to their product by placing FIJI Water in films and TV shows and getting celebrity endorsements by sending samples to them. As stated in the Chapter 8 vignette of Principles of Marketing; so much attention to FIJI Water is now given by stars; the water, by some, is known as “the bottled water of the stars”. (Kotler & Armstrong, 2008 p. 217-18) People of all ages are extremely influenced by what the elite do, in this country; so it only made sense to reach the masses in this way. Getting the product into restaurants and hotels was genius. The...