• by Aaron Baar , July 18, 2014

With soda consumption dwindling, Nestle’s Pure Life brand is looking to attract consumers to a different option, sparkling water, highlighting the absence of artificial colors and sweeteners with a variety of interesting flavors.

Those flavors give the product, currently available in Target Stores nationwide and aiming for a wider rollout later this year and into 2015, its name: Nestle Pure Life Exotics Sparkling Water. 

“As a leader in the bottled water category, Nestle is always looking to help people make healthier choices,” Matt Gorman, senior marketing manager in innovation for Nestle, tells Marketing Daily. “As soda consumption decreases, and water consumption increases, people want to enjoy what they eat and drink.”

The company is looking to open up a whole new beverage category, Gorman says, estimating fewer than 20% of U.S. households drink sparkling water or seltzer. Despite familiarity with carbonation from soda, getting consumers to try sparkling water (in the U.S. at least) carries a bit of a learning curve.

“There’s an adoption period with sparkling water. For the normal user, it takes about seven days to acquire the taste,” Gorman says. “We wanted to create a product that would shorten that transition from soda.”

Thus the flavors. With combinations such as Mango-Peach-Pineapple and Strawberry-DragonFruit, the Nestle Pure Life Exotics Sparkling Water are designed to be like nothing else on the shelves, says Gigi Leporati, brand manager for Nestle Pure Life. 

“We were very purposeful in the flavors and fruits that we selected,” Leporati says. “The combinations were [chosen] very much to achieve the excitement factor of these drinks over sodas.”

Because it’s only available in Target stores, marketing of the Nestle Pure Life Exotics Sparkling Water will be extremely targeted, limited to in-store tastings, digital promotions and presence on some of Target’s promotional tools (like Cartwheel), Gorman says.

“The consumers we both share are very digitally savvy,” he says. “We’re going to be expanding out our marketing plan as distribution expands.”