While many people who buy Bottled water realize that it may not be healthy for them or the environment, they do so because of their fear of dying, a new study has revealed.

According to the study, which was recently published in the Journal Applied Environmental Education & Communication, bottled water marketing campaigns target our deepest psychological vulnerability, triggering our subconscious fear of dying, which drives consumers to purchase billions of liters of bottled water every year.

"Bottled water advertisements play on our greatest fears in two important ways," says Stephanie Cote, who conducted the research while a graduate student at Waterloo. "Our mortality fears make us want to avoid risks and, for many people, bottled water seems safer somehow, purer or controlled. There is also a deeper subconscious force at work here, one that caters to our desire for immortality."

According to a Euromonitor report, in 2013 Canadians alone purchased nearly two and a half billion liters of bottled water. Despite rigorous and ongoing campaigns aimed at curbing bottled water consumption, this figure is expected to increase to three billion liters for 2018, equating to a monetary value of $3.3 billion Canadian dollars.

In the US, the figure is far higher. In 2016, Americans consumed 12.8 billion gallons of bottled water. The global consumption of bottled water is staggering. In 2012, 288 billion liters of bottled water were consumed across the world, and this was projected to increase to 391 billion liters by 2017. Bottled water advertising campaigns are clearly very effective.

For the study, the researchers applied Terror Management Theory (TMT), a concept commonly used in social psychology, which argues that in an effort to repress both our conscious and subconscious fear of dying we develop defenses that can influence certain behaviors, including our consumption choices, financial security and status.

The team analyzed the content used in bottled water advertising campaigns, including web content, images and video content that imparted explicit and implicit meanings, while at the same time assessing the effectiveness of anti-bottled water drives. They found that anti-bottled water campaigns struggled to compete with advertising messaging put out by big corporates.

"Our results demonstrate that corporate campaigns appeal to people who measure their personal value by their physical appearance, fitness levels, material and financial wealth, class, and status," said Sarah Wolfe, a researcher in Waterloo's Faculty of Environment, and co-author of the paper. "Pro-bottle water advertisements rely heavily on branding, celebrity, and feel-good emotions that trigger our group identities and patriotism."

In order for anti-bottled water drives to be more effective, there clearly needs to be a change tactics with messaging that extends beyond the economical, environmental and ethical benefits of drinking tap water. Consumers need to receive a clear message that it is not only healthier and way more cool to drink filtered tap water than bottled water, people who do so are likely to live longer.

It has been shown that in most cases bottled water is no purer than tap water. Furthermore, plastic water bottles can leach out contaminants such as BPA, as well as release microplastic fibers into the water. The reality is that anyone wanting to live a long, healthy life should be drinking filtered municipal water using a system like the berkey water filter rather than bottled water, and should not be swayed by big corporations with even bigger advertising budgets.

Journal Reference

Stephanie Cote, S. E. Wolfe. Evidence of mortality salience and psychological defenses in bottled water campaigns. Applied Environmental Education & Communication, 2017; 1 DOI: 10.1080/1533015X.2017.1399836