Great Taste, Less Waste
2,000 water bottles are used every second. Even though we know their environmental impact, single-use plastic bottles are difficult to avoid. So when Grounded was tasked with bringing a new, infinitely recyclable Brita® bottled water to market, it not only aligned with their skills, but also their purpose as an award winning B-corp. They knew designing eye-catching packaging, selling into major retailors, and creating effective social campaigns would require an insights-driven approach. By partnering with SightX, grounded delivered a product that was not only loved by the media and major retailers, but the customers in their target market.
5 start product reviews
Featured in the Packaging Innovation Awards, The Dieline, and Forbes
Sold into major retailers in a single meeting
About Grounded
Grounded is a multi-award winning B Corp. marketing agency with decades of experience in design, brand activation, sustainability marketing, and social impact.
They work with the world’s best known brands, startups, and non-profits to help them articulate purpose, activate their brands, and accelerate their impact.
As a founding brand purpose agency partner of Brands for Good, a Top 200 Social Impact Company, and member of 1% for the Planet, Grounded is a leading expert in connecting the “why” of purpose to the “way” of profit.
So it was no surprise that B Water & Beverages, who had licensed Brita® , trusted Grounded with a new innovative idea for the premium bottled water market.
The Challenge
Today, 2,000 plastic bottles are used every second. By 2050, there will be more plastic in our oceans than fish. Brita® is on a mission to change that.
As a leader in the fight to reduce single-use plastic waste with at-home filtration systems, Brita® turned their sights to the bottled water industry. They recognized that while many consumers wanted to actively avoid plastic bottles, they would often cave and purchase them out of convenience while on the go because they either didn’t have a refillable one on hand, or it was simply too inconvenient to carry. From this challenge, an idea arose; a convenient bottled water in a refillable and infinitely recyclable aluminum packaging, allowing consumers to ditch the plastic even while out and about.
When Brita® brought their idea to Grounded, they knew they would need to develop a premium packaging solution that stood out in a crowded premium bottled water market. One that would convince shoppers, primarily Millennials and Gen Z, to trade up to Brita’s new offering.
The SightX Solution
Grounded knew from the start that this would be no easy feat. Not only would they need to create standout packaging and aspirational messaging, but they would also need to dig deeper into Brita’s target demographic to uncover their motivators, purchasing behaviors, and preferences.
So they turned to SightX to get all of the research tools they needed in one intuitive end-to-end platform. After conducting stakeholder interviews, Grounded logged on to SightX to begin their landscape assessment, retail audit, package design assessment, shelf testing, and consumer segmentation studies. The robust agility and flexibility of SightX enabled Grounded to efficiently conduct all of the research they needed across 2 studies within days, and all within one platform.
Mixing traditional survey methods with packaging concept tests, competitive shelf testing, pricing studies, and sentiment analysis allowed them to streamline the research process and get time back to focus on their strategy and implementation. The insights led to a packaging design with high appeal and purchase intent that stood out from the crowd and was priced competitively.
The Impact
Thanks to Grounded’s creative work and data-driven insights from SightX, Brita’s new aluminum-packed bottled water made quite the splash (pun intended)!
While major press pickups in outlets like Forbes and Dieline were significant, the real win came in the form of raving customers. Consumers loved that the bottles they often bought out of convenience could now be re-used and more easily recycled, reducing the amount of plastic waste generated. Plus the premium look and solid feel of the bottles made it even easier for the shoppers to make the switch.
But it wasn’t just consumers who loved Brita’s new innovation. Retailers took note of the warm market reception, helping Brita sell their newest product into major retailers in their very first meeting.