The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2020–2021
Reckitt turned Turkey's drought into a number quoted like an exchange rate.
Finish built a Water Index with a bank and got it shown next to the dollar and euro, so a scarce resource became a headline price people track daily.
Reckitt (Finish) · Havas Turkey
the move
Because three-quarters of the world is water and Turkey is ringed by seas, people assumed water was infinite, even though usable water is only a tiny fraction of the total. The brand's brief was to make that scarcity clear and invite people to save.
Havas Turkey built the Finish Water Index with the Turkish Industrial Development Bank, calculating it from dam occupancy and consumption across agriculture, industry and households. It was then reported on CNN Turk and Bloomberg HT and on the economy pages of national newspapers, presented next to the dollar and the euro.
The index read 86, just above a critical value of 70, so a single number implied how close the country was to trouble. Being quoted constantly like a currency made water a quantity whose value everyone could watch fall.
why it works
- A daily-updated number made scarcity visible instead of abstract
- Placing it in economy coverage borrowed the authority of financial data
- Being shown next to the dollar and euro made it feel like a real price
- The bank's backing gave the index credibility as an economic figure
what transfers
For an abstract scarcity, manufacture a concrete metric and give it the same daily coverage as money; people act on what they can track.
what came after
The index reached roughly 27 million people on TV with about 25 million monthly reach through news-site widgets. It earned some $500,000 of free media coverage, its page drew 80,000 visitors in the second week and 155,000 views in the first two. Reckitt reported that among people who saw it, water consumption fell around 9%. TSKB later tracked the index declining in 2020, and it won multiple media and data awards.
references
- FINISH WATER INDEX — Eurobest 2020 Media winner
- TSKB Economic Research underlines 'water' theme in its second Climate Review report
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