priya tuli's randombloggz

Well. Today I made a sucker out of me again. I bought myself a carton of those dinky little bottles of “oxygen-enhanced” water, you know the ones? I remember thinking, oh wow, extra-oxygenated water, that must really be good for you, after all every cell in the body needs oxygen, and considering how much I rob them of with the smoking, I should do them a favor by drinking gallons of this precious elixir.

But wait. You remember your basic physics from school, yes? Where every molecule of H₂O (water) = two molecules of H and one molecule of O? So now, you tell me something. When you add more oxygen to that equation, it isn’t H₂O any more, it becomes H₂O + O. So is that H₂O₂, or H₂O₃? Who knows, because isn’t oxygen O₂ anyway? So technically, it isn’t water any more. It tastes like water, it looks like water. But chemistry equations don’t lie; if there’s more oxygen in it, that changes the entire molecular structure. So what does that make it, then, apart from just another marketing gimmick? I have no idea.

So first, I did a quick spot-check, an informal survey if you like, at the supermarket water shelf. Rows and rows of oxygen-enriched brands, touted to oxygenate every living cell in your corpus and afford them plenty of combustion-enhancing, metabolism-boosting oxygennnn!

There was this guy checking out the same bottles as I was, assiduously reading the small print on each one.
“Have you tried these?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he answered, “I’ve tried most of them, but this one is new.”
He was fondling the same sort of bottle I was, I think we were both seduced by the shape.
“So, is it good stuff? Do you feel any different, I mean all that extra oxygen?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he says, “I feel fresher, it gives me more energy.”
Uh huh, I’m thinking, don’t want to go there, buddy.
“And it tastes different. Better than ordinary water,” he adds.

This much is true, I found out later; it does seem to have a more clean, honest, water taste than the ordinary, and therefore cheaper, brands.

My decision is made; I buy a carton of the stuff and as I head over to the check-out counter, I’m reminded of that whole other buzz over oxygen bars, some years ago. Another fad that zoomed into favor for a brief moment in time, and then went up in a puff of, ahem, smoke. But not before several oxygen bar owners had built themselves a nice little retirement fund. This is the thing about fads; you come up with a new idea, market it as a new trend and if it catches on, you’re made.

So marketers are speculators too, in a way, as they need to measure the pulse and the moment, estimating it accurately enough to make a killing on the supermarket shelf. Most often, for limited trajectory products, services or brands, it has to be that initial push, supported with an intense publicity blitz, that makes the mirthful trip to bank a reality for the investor. Quickly now, before someone comes out and questions the premise and the bubble bursts.

And so, I am a sucker. You’d think I’d know better, with nearly 3 decades in the marketing milieu, but I am as susceptible as the next person to whatever new spiel some overpaid copywriter has thought up, to justify yet another product or service to dupe ever-gullible consumers with. In fact, I’m currently on an aggressive conversion binge, insisting that everybody I know must try this new brand of extra-oxygenated water. And by now I’m so full of O₂ that you’d better not mess with me!