Balian Water is the first premium bottled natural mineral water to be sourced from Mount Agung in Bali.

Brand Snapshot

Bottled water is perhaps the prime example of perceptual framing in branding. It takes a commodity product, wraps it in a story, and then sells it for more dollars.

As a category, those have stories tended to be about extremes, because the inference is what carries the price tag. It says (allowing for some creative licence) the water is so good that they’ve gone to the furthest places (Fiji Water), the coldest places (Voss), the highest mountains (Evian) or even the most dangerous locations (Volvic), just to bring you the water.

These narrative extremities tend to deal with the physical, but perhaps there’s an opportunity for Balian water to extend this to the spiritual. Bali, for all its island hype, is undeniably known for inward gazing: people go there on pilgrimages of self-discovery. So why not be the premium water that says, we’ve gone to unprecedented spiritual lengths to bring you the perfect water? Spiritualism, after all, has connotations of cleansing, purity, balance, which are all sought-after codes in the water category.

To that extent, Balian Water feels like it is missing a trick. It comes across as caught somewhere between Fiji Water and Volvic, rather than owning its own enlightened path - which it only loosely alludes to in its message of ‘absolute’ hydration for the body and soul. Indeed, Balinese beliefs even say that the holiest water comes from far upstream and has cleansing powers - i.e. narrative gold. Ultimately Balian has lots of good story components - Mount Agung, sacred origins, the spirit of Bali - but they might be better organised and housed under a more built-out and broader “spiritually sourced” proposition.