Identifying Consumers' Underlying Motivations

What Motivates Consumers To Buy Bottled Water?


Motivations play an important role in consumer behavior. They are subconscious and can be triggered by marketing message. Motivation can be security or safety, convenience, basic need like thirst, and so on. The best way to use emotion in marketing strategy is to look at motivators that experience consumers.

When bottled water was first introduced to the market consumers laughed at the concept. Paying for water in a bottle while they could drink it from the tap almost for free did not make sense to them. However, the marketing message changed their way of thinking by making the issue personal. This message developed a caution about drinking tap water among consumers. Consumers became aware of impurities of tap water. They began purchasing bottled water not for their convenience but for their health. By drinking bottled water they felt safe and protected.

Thus, the emotion of fear of tap water impurities moved consumers into action. The major motivators when purchasing water were health benefits and personal safety,  and since consumers wanted to feel safe they began buying bottled water.

Nowadays, despite tough economic times, people are still spending money on bottled water. Although over the course of time the primary motivator became convenience and only then health benefits, according to a study conducted in the United Kingdom.

The study, published in the open access journal BMC Public Health, is based on interviews with 23 users of the Munrow Sports Centre on the campus of University of Birmingham. The majority of participants drank on average 0.5 to 3.5 liters per week. Two participants drank more than 10 liters per week, and two said they never drank bottled water.

Although most study participants said they drink bottled water because they believe it's safer than tap water, they were unsure exactly what these benefits were. Despite the health benefits, the most commonly given reason for purchasing bottled water was convenience. Even those who did not believe that bottled water was safer than tap water said that they purchased bottled water when they were out.

Many people also said they buy bottled water because it tastes better. "I can definitely taste the difference between like a Fiji water and an Evian," one woman said. "I think tap water kind of tastes like sewer," said another.