THERE'S NO WATER FILTER LIKE A LAICA

The Brief

LAICA – a leading Italian consumer goods company for water filtration, health care and wellbeing - might be the most famous brand found in many a Nonna’s kitchen, but literally no one in the UK had ever heard the name before. Let alone how to even say it…LA…I..CA?

Led by a fellow MiniMBA trained marketer, the brief was textbook proper marketing. Understand the market through research, develop a long-term brand positioning and launch a distinctive brand building campaign that would win share of mind and market in a busy, but largely undifferentiated category. Game on.

An Italian favourite for decades, LAICA make water taste better and feel better. We needed to get the UK to say their name.

The Response

…Gasp! quickly got to work with a three-Cs (competitor, company, customer) analysis with extensive segmentation, behavioural insights and market sizing shining a light on the most commercially attractive space to play. 

In a category dominated by one global filtration-only player (Brita anyone?), with newer scale-ups entering the space (Bear Grylls?!), we knew we had to double down on what made LAICA, well, LAICA. 

During the strategic development, some key themes and choices emerged…

First, the British public bloody love Italy. Way more than most countries. This fascination with La Dolce Vita has a positive halo effect on the perception of Italian goods, from fashion and cars to food, drink and especially water. Thanks, San Pelligrino, for all your hard work. 

With plenty of hard evidence to demonstrate the powerful opportunity to play this Country of Origin Effect card, we were confident that putting LAICA’s Italian roots at the heart of our positioning and campaign creative was a quick ticket to not only distinctiveness but increased positive perceptions towards an unknown brand.

From a category perspective most water filter brands are overly reliant on fear tactics. They choose to focus on the nasties found in UK tap water. You also need a science degree to decode any of the product features. Of course, you want your filter to remove bad stuff from the water you drink, but LAICA is capable of more. LAICA’s genuine filtration superiority means they are capable of both removing the bad, like microplastics and heavy metals, but also retaining and adding more of the good, essential minerals like magnesium, calcium and potassium. Our research revealed the British public were aware of the bad stuff but not the potential for retaining the good. Meanwhile sales in health supplements like magnesium have been growing YoY. Clearly there was an opportunity to address this in the campaign.

So, with a superior product, an ownable product benefit to exploit, untapped demand amongst a wellbeing audience, plus a potentially tricky to pronounce, Italian brand name, only a sticky pneumonic strapline could fix this conundrum, cue…There’s no water like a LAICA. Paired with the campaign headline of Ciao to the good stuff, Arrivederci to the rest, our ambition to be unmistakeably Italian and introduce this more balanced view of water filtration started to come to life.

Another consideration from the get go was distinction and brand assets (or brand codes for our fellow Ritson-ites). In a category awash with generic, stock images of “happy hydrated families” we wanted to immediately step away and do something entirely different. Enter our own version of the happy hydrated family, albeit dating back to the 15th century. 

We also wanted to add an audio component to the brand, a simple sonic ID that would become associated with LAICA for many years to come. And again, it needed to feel very Italian. 

With clarity on the fundamentals of who we were targeting, brand positioning, coupled with a tight set of objectives, we set about combining creative and media choices to ensure we were delivering a high-reach and high-attention campaign on a budget befitting of a new-to-market and highly focused brand. Every media pound had to work hard. 

High-profile OOH spots across the Transport for London estate were secured, specifically areas known to have the hardest water, creating a big brand effect for the launch phase. 

This was tied together with targeted audio ads served to health-conscious Londoners irreverently parodying wellbeing and relaxation tracks, voiced by the most Italian of Italians. Finally, a door drop campaign ensured a physical brand-in-hand moment to hundreds of thousands, a final hurrah in this UK launch campaign. 

The Results
The campaign is running across London now with brand tracking results being monitored into Q4. 2026 planning is already underway.