Question:
Coca Cola is not a company known for making too many mistakes. Its marketing is slick and Coke is the best-selling soft drink in the world. Few would have predicted that Coke's attempt to launch its Dasani bottled water brand in the UK would prove to be a disaster for such an experienced company.

In just five weeks, Dasani had come and gone Yet, in March this year, only five weeks after its multi million pound UK launch, red-faced Coke executives were forced to take Dasani off the shelves in the UK.

What went wrong?

Answer: Dasani was launched in the USA in 1999 as a bottled, purified water, and had become a huge success there. Taking that same formula and repeating it for the UK market must have looked like a breeze, but that wasn't quite how it turned out.

Unlike most of the bottled water sold in British petrol stations and supermarkets Dasani hadn't come from alpine glaciers or trickled out of a precious natural spring - it had come out of the local tap. True, the company put it through a purification process and added mineral salts, but the source was still tap water.

At its launch on 10 February, some people in the drinks industry already knew Dasani's big "secret". Simon Mowbray of The Grocer magazine had mentioned the source of the water in an article, but didn't think anyone else would pick up on it. Now, he sees it more graphically. "It was a bomb waiting to go off," he says.