Okay, okay. It's not the Real Thing^® and yes, it does contain carcinogens. But, other than that...

New Zealand Herald:

The fiasco meant complete collapse of Coke's ambitious attempt, with a £7 million high-profile publicity campaign, to break into Britain's burgeoning bottled water market, which is worth more than £1 billion a year and now growing by 20 per cent annually.

Executives at the Coca-Cola (Great Britain) headquarters in Hammersmith, West London, were horrified by a PR catastrophe on a scale with the jeweller Gerald Ratner's famous comparison of his products to prawn sandwiches, or Shell's attempt to sink the giant oil storage buoy Brent Spar in the Atlantic. "Obviously, we are very upset about it," said one.

Executives... were horrified by a PR catastrophe

I realize this is the journalist's characterization, but it does pretty much sum up the gaping maw of where real people are and what corporations view as a "perception challenge": The Truth. And it's relative importance. Read on...

Dasani was said to undergo a complex purification process and then have carefully selected minerals added to it.

But the brand hit trouble straightaway when it emerged that the source for Disani was actually the Thames Water mains supply to Coke's Sidcup plant - which has passed more than 99.9 per cent of quality checks, making it already one of the purest drinking waters in the world.

While half a litre of Thames tap water costs 0.03p, half a litre of it bottled as Dasani was costing 95p, a mark-up of more than 3,000 times, or a profit of more than 300,000 per cent.

As a person charged with working in this stylized Kabuki called "marketing" I know the hits people's integrity takes having to justify things in their professional lives they would flat out reject in their personal dealings. In this way, we find ourselves stuck, checking our principles at the door for a paycheck. Our values haven't changed. We're just asked to visit them on weekends. Like the children of divorce.

This is systemic entropy in action. It is unsustainable in human terms. And this should be deeply troubling to business leaders. Instead, we hear crickets and the occasional dog barking in the distance.

They say millennial milestones bring profound change. I'm not worried. Ours is just late, not DOA.

Link from PR Fuel via Corporate Engagement