"Come to where the ___ is"
Adding the spice of vice to ordinary H2O.
I’d read a little about Natural Spirit, a brand that calls itself “the wild west of water” and whose packaging intentionally “looks like a pack of Marlboro Reds in a can,” as Fast Company put it last month in an article about how “water branding has officially gone off the rails” (paywalled).
But I’d missed Natural Spirit’s newest messaging, revealed on Instagram last week. I learned about it on Tuesday morning from a brief bullet point in
’s Feed Me newsletter.
Do you see what I see? It’s not just the can design. The whole ad is a clone of — or an homage to, if you’re feeling generous — Marlboro, which used “Come to where the flavor is … Come to Marlboro Country” as its slogan throughout the 1960s and 1970s. And which made the Marlboro Man — most famously a cowboy — its ruggedly silent spokes-smoker1.
Before cigarette advertising was banned from U.S. broadcast media in 1970, Marlboro commercials featured cowboys ridin’, ropin’, and hunkerin’ down to the stirring strains of Elmer Bernstein’s theme from the 1960 western The Magnificent Seven. (Marlboro had bought the rights to the music from United Artists.) The campaign, created by the Leo Burnett agency, turned Marlboro into the top-selling cigarette brand in the U.S., and later the world.
It was a dramatic about-face for a brand that since the 1930s had been marketed as a women’s cigarette. Back then, Marlboro ads touted the product’s “ivory-tipped” filter and “mild as May” tobacco.
Strange at it seems, something parallel is happening with water branding. Andrea Hernández, who publishes the
newsletter, calls it “vice-ification”:Though its fair to seem skeptical as first, there’s a reason WaterTok (1.2B views) has exploded in popularity, see: water of the day, “boring water” is passé, no one really cares if it’s from European alps or Fiji or Poland springs (see Nestlé offloading their entire North American water division) this generation wants water to feel like something it’s not. Not that “sexy water” is a novel concept, see Perrier, Vichy or Pellegrino (Did you know LaCroix was born as a spoof of snobbish European water?)
Natural Spirit was launched in 2023 by Evan Slagle and Joe Soriero, who had backgrounds in natural wine and craft brewing, respectively. They intended the brand as “a one-off release,” according to Fast Company,
but the response from customers and industry professionals was so strong that Soriero and Slagle decided to build it into a real company. Part of the brand’s appeal, Soriero says, is that it taps into a growing interest in the Americana aesthetic, a trend that’s extending beyond the beverage industry to music (think Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter) and fashion (i.e. Pharrell Williams’s Western collaboration with Louis Vuitton).
Natural Spirit follows other vice-ified water brands like Liquid Death (“Murder Your Thirst”) and Not Beer (“Never a Bad Time”), which allow teetotallers to feel like cool, savvy rebels and to look just as vice-ified as their alcohol-chugging peers.
Here’s a footnote to the Natural Spirit story. The contents of the can are “sourced from one of Virginia’s oldest springs, where clear, sweet and crisp water has been flowing for thousands of years,” according to the brand’s About page. And where are Natural Spirit’s corporate offices? They’re in Richmond, Virginia. And who else is headquartered in the former capital of the Confederacy? That’s right: Altria, which is the parent company of Philip Morris, which is the parent company of Marlboro. Altria’s current slogan is “Moving Beyond Smoking.” Maybe they’ll branch out into canned water.
For extra credit: How Marlboro changed advertising forever (video).
At least four Marlboro Men died of smoking-related diseases. Another Marlboro Man, Robert Norris, was a nonsmoker who abandoned the campaign because he didn’t want to set a bad example for his children. He died in 2019.
Wow. Of course, a lot of us tree-huggers think bottled water IS a vice (canned water not quite so much) but we're not who the campaign is aimed at. And as a non-drinker, I guess I appreciate making water as sexy as alcohol. But still, weird.
At least, LaCroix Sparkling Water is made in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.