How Danone Used Nostalgia To Penetrate It's Evian Brand In The Chinese Market

Nostalgia is unique to everyone, of course, but there is one thing that’s common to us all: It has a sensory trigger that brings back memories of unfettered happiness. No one around the table is storming off angrily, or furiously texting a friend. Everyone is fully in the moment.

“Happiness is not something you experience, it’s something you remember,” Oscar Levant

Brands and companies should know that for most of us, the past is always better than the present. The danger is that this makes us unwitting suckers for everything that reminds us of being young.

For the past few decades, 9 out of 10 French parents have given their babies Evian Water.

 As it turns out, it’s not just our personal past that can affect our brand preferences for years to come. We also have an abnormal attachment to past tastes and flavors of our history and culture. When Danone decided to conquer the Chinese market with their Evian brand, they decided to pump the water from a chines well that produced water of the same quality as the one in the French alps. 

This ended up as a flop. As we all know, the taste of water is frustratingly difficult to put in words. So, an Evian research group tasked with figuring out why the Chinese hated the water so much decided to ask them questions about their childhood. The results explained everything.

Just 2 decades earlier, most of China was farmland.

Most of the time, consumers are seeking to activate and re-create taste memories from long ago, though we are not always conscious of it. This was what was going on with the Evian water in China. Chinese consumers weren’t used to the bustling, urban China of today. Most of them had grown up in agrarian surroundings and had grown accustomed to the faintest, subtlest taste of green vegetation in their drinking water.

Evian thought they were marketing to the China of today and not the China of yesteryear. Based on the answers to the survey questions, Evian had no choice but to hunt down wells in China that, after filtration, still boasted a faint, grassy, muddy note. Danone is now the 3^rd largest player in the Chinese water market.