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The Consumption of Useless Products The consumption of useless products The motivation of consumer behavior in the consumption of bottled water Bachelor thesis Anthropology Student: Chiel de Block (10469222) Bachelor: Future Planet Studies Supervisor: dr. D. H. (Danny) de Vries Word Count: 11.330 Second reader: dr. K. Krause Date: 08-12-2015 Institute: University of Amsterdam Introduction It is the grand opening of a new product line called ‘Dupé’. Someone enters the shop and looks around. All he sees are glass jars, decorated with beautiful labels, on top of modern wooden tables and side tables. It really shows something authentic. Customers wander around and some even look a bit confused. At first sight, the jars may seem empty, but ‘Dupé’ mostly sells organic fresh air, which is its signature product. A lot of care has been put into containing the air and labeling the products, according to the shop-assistant. When a customer hears the price of a jar that is the size of about a jam jar, she is a bit shocked, it is $150. Would she pay that much money for some fresh air? Definitely not, she decides. The skeptical costumers find it ridiculous. Why would you buy air? One customer even points out that he could just go outside and breathe the fresh air. The shop-assistant could only agree with that. “It’s kinda like buying bottled water” he says. And the costumer could only agree with that… It doesn’t make sense to buy bottled water.1 Over the last years I wondered the same thing, why is it that people buy bottled water? In my mind it does not make sense. Why would people buy this, while there is no added value to it? Or do they know something I do not? All my life I have been drinking water from the tap. In a lot of other countries water from the tap is perfectly drinkable and of good quality. Not to mention the fact that, in the Netherlands for example, it is available everywhere. Still, in the Netherlands twenty percent of the Dutch population buys their water bottled (Spitz et al. 2014). When we look around us, one might notice the ubiquitousness of drinking water. Everywhere around us, people are constantly sipping. Water, and particularly its bottle, has become a new personal accessory. Plastic bottles, and the water they contain, have insinuated themselves into our everyday life. We are living in a new water reality. Buying bottled water is part of that reality. In a time when people get more and more conscious about the world we live in, it is mesmerizing to see that this behavior that is unsustainable on the one hand and on the other hand is also ‘obviously’ superfluous still exists. In the whole supply chain of the product bottled water, unsustainable fossil fuel is used (e.g. in the transportation and production of the bottles) while the plastic of the bottles is made of precious oil and partly ends up in nature, as can be seen with the plastic soup drifting in the pacific ocean (Hawkins 2011). The environmental impact of bottled water is more than 90 times higher than that of tap water. Besides that, compared to tap water, the production of bottled water uses 1000 times more energy (Marcussen et al. 2013). 1 Yara Valley’s campaign ‘It doesn’t make sense to buy bottled water’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3oAv0BjtN4 2 The production, packaging and transport of bottled water cause the water to pollute 500 times more CO2 than for the same amount of tap water. Not to mention the extra water that is needed in order to produce that one bottle of water. Bottled water is up to two till seven times more water intensive to produce than tap water (Spitz et al. 2014). Besides the environmental impact of this product, bottled water is also up to 2000 times more expensive than tap water (Clarke 2007). The bottled water industry seems to be exploiting natural resources as well as consumers. To this list, a lot of negative aspects could be added. Combining the fact that there are countries where qualitatively good tap water is available everywhere, that bottled water is bad for the environment and that it is more expensive, leaves me puzzled. Because there are millions of people, all around the world, that keep on consuming this product. Therefore, the question I would like to address in this thesis is as follows: What motivates consumer behavior in the consumption of irrational and irrelevant products, like bottled water? In scientific literature, little is written on consumer’s motivation to buy bottled water and the fact that this is such a growing phenomenon. Obviously the market is expanding and the bottled water brands get a lot of competition, but there is a drive for the consumer to keep on buying more water. There is little, to nothing, written about this crucial aspect of the thriving of consumption of bottled water; the sheer motivation behind consuming this type of water above the alternative of tap water. What is written are explanations given on which needs are satisfied, from a consumer and individual perspective. So the answer why people do buy it has to be searched for in the area of the motivation for people to consume in the first place. Furthermore, it is been taken for granted that a large share of people buy bottled water eventually, but there is so little understanding of why people feel motivated to consume this. What I am arguing is that this bottled water discussion in the scientific literature needs an anthropological approach on the reason why people consume and why they consume bottled water. The subject is relevant for anthropology because it is a phenomenon that is interwoven and rooted in our own culture, therefore emic and etic are so tangled up that we are not able to see clearly the absurdity of this phenomenon. These puzzlements about our own cultural practices are sometimes easily overlooked. That is why it is necessary to remove emic from etic in this thesis and for once give an anthropological account on what it is people gain when consuming bottled water. I could argue, from a rational, taste-oriented, economic and environmental point of view that bottled water is a futile product and that it is an irrational behavior to consume it. However, it is a fact that the market of bottled water is vastly increasing (Wilk 2006). Therefore I could state that there is more to understand about this phenomenon, since rationality is inadequate to explain why people consume bottled water. When more is known about what compels people in this environmentally polluting behavior, this behavior might be understood better. This is important, 3 because changing this behavior can only be thoroughly done when the root of the problem is addressed and understood. Since, when we change this behavior, we pursue a more sustainable society where people care about the environment and future generations. For this thesis, literate study is done. To my surprise, a lot of scientific information is written on bottled water. Once submerged in the world of bottled water, more and more articles were brought to the surface. Dozens of articles were read. This is why I had to narrow my topic down; bottled water consumption in total was in fact a lot to cover. However, when searching in anthropological sources for bottled water, I swiftly noticed that little attention was given to the underlying reason on why it is that bottled water consumption today is still ongoing. In fact, no anthropological account of bottled water (consumption) was given at all. Therefore I used consumption theories and literature to gain a deeper understanding of the motivation on consumption as a whole. This gave me a better comprehension of how to see the consumption of futile products. I read several books on bottled water, which are written plentiful in the last couple of years, and got a lot of background information on where bottled water came from. The stories were all pretty similar. Together with the history of bottled water consumption, it gave me a way to apply consumption theories to the motivation of bottled water consumption. I used a specific, though in my view relevant, way of looking better at bottled water consumption, because I noticed that no author I have read so far, dared to link bottled water consumption to explanations on consumption in the Western society. This thesis is structured as follows. The first section is a brief overview of the anthropological theories of consumerism, relevant for this thesis and for making my argument on the motivation for consuming bottled water. In order to understand the consumption of futile products, we need to take a closer look at a selection of ideas brought forward about consumption in the last decennia. Using broad theories will help explain ‘the particular’, which in this case is bottled water consumption in contemporary society. This overview is followed by background information on both tap water and the invention of bottled water. It shows that the consumption of bottled water is a culturally rooted phenomenon and already is a first indication of the argument that there is cultural logic associated with bottled water consumption. The section will argue that bottled water and the irrelevant consumption of it did not appear out of thin air. This is followed by a short section on the framing of bottled water done by the bottled water companies. The sections will be interwoven with theories of consumerism discussed earlier. In the end a conclusion is given of my thesis and the insights I tried to deliver.
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