Brilliant Branding or Diabolical Branding?

How Perrier Tried to Retain All the Good with None of The Bad

I spent over 25 years in Brand Management. One of the realities of hiring a new brand manager is the first thing he/she will do is change the packaging of the product. It doesn’t matter if the product is successful or not.

When I saw Maison Perrier earlier this year, my first thought was “New Brand Manager, eh?”

As I dug deeper into this branding, I realized that it wasn’t a rebrand of Perrier because original Perrier was still on the market. But the story behind the Maison Perrier launch (May 2024) is either sneaky good or blatantly evil, depending on how much truth you want in your advertising.

Perrier probably would have never launched Maison Perrier if not for some nasty contamination of their Perrier source wells due to excessive rainfall plus some tight French laws. Turns out when the French allow a claim like “bottled at the source” they really mean you take the water out of the ground and put it in bottles without doing anything to it. Unfortunately, due to numerous issues with contamination of the source wells, Nestle (owner of Perrier) felt the need to purify the water, which the French do not allow. Hence the branding dilemma.

This is where the “brilliant branding” of Maison Perrier comes into play. The name itself plus the packaging is deceptively similar to the base Perrier brand, which will lead most people to believe that Maison Perrier (house of Perrier) is identical to the base brand. However, Maison Perrier is not identical because it is purified and flavored in ways the French would not allow without the branding change.

The diabolical branding aspect is the ease at which Nestle skirts the truth in its marketing. They don’t explicitly explain why the change was made, nor do they highlight the reasons for doing it. To be clear, they don’t lie…they just let a few things unsaid.

You decide…brilliant branding or diabolical branding?