My previous post references an article from Friday’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which explains the new uncertainty about the structure of water. There’s another takeaway from that article which speaks to marketers: a source of new stories about water.

Last month, H2Om launched what it calls “the world’s first ‘vibrationally charged’ bottled water.” WSJ columnist Sharon Begley explains:

Although H2Om (pronounced H-two-Om, as in the mantra) starts with conventional spring water, exposure to words on the bottle’s label alters it, says the company: “Love” and “Perfect Health,” the first varieties, each transmits a “vibrational frequency” that the water absorbs. Each bottle is supposedly also infused through music (in the storage room after bottling) and thoughts (from the person drinking it). The precise science by which the water retains its desirable new structure even as the delivery van passes billboards about HIV and graffiti filled with hate words remains to be worked out.

(The arrival of a company like H2Om is probably no surprise for those of you who have seen the movie What The Bleep Do We Know?. The movie references the work of Masaru Emoto, who has made some interesting claims about water.)

I can see it now:
> New bottled water companies emerge with names and vibrations across the entire spectrum
> Delivery vans, semi-trailers, and bottles made with a new composite material which blocks unwanted vibrations from written messages and sounds which fill the outside world
> Limited edition batches infused with Madonna’s live voice in a recording studio
> Home brew — I download pre-recorded water-enhancing vibes on iTunes to infuse a basic pre-vibed H2O blend my way using specially-made bottles which connect to my iPod via an adapter
> New Starbucks-like cafes appear, walls plastered with words that give the best vibes, menus more abundant with options than even the famous coffee shop

Sound crazy? Well, so did bottled water not too long ago.

If you still think you’re selling a commodity, it seems to me you’d better take a closer look at your product, your customers — just about everything you’re currently doing. There’s got to be a new story there, just waiting to be discovered.

The title of Sharon Begley’s column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal — “The Structure of Water Isn’t Certain After All; Marketers Take Note” — certainly caught my attention. How can we not know something as basic and abundant as water?

Leave it to Stanford University – the launch pad for so many world-changing tech companies in Silicon Valley – to propose such a disruptive idea: Water may not be what we thought it was.

Here’s how Begley summarized the findings of scientists at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL):
“Liquid water, they concluded from the X-ray data, has a structure totally at odds with what textbooks say and what scientists have believed for more than a century. Rather than being a sea of tetrahedrons — little pyramids with triangular bases, formed when each water molecule connects to four others — it seems to be an ocean of rings and chains, with most molecules hooking up with only two others via strong bonds.”

What really struck me about this story was the manner in which the water pyramid has apparently crumbled:

An accident shatters conventional wisdom
No one thought to challenge the existing ideas about water’s structure. The original intent of the SSRL team was to study the chemical bonds within molecules in water, not how the molecules connect to each other.

The emperor has no clothes
According to SSRL chemical physicist Anders Nilsson, there wasn’t much meat behind the idea that water molecules form pyramids: “Experimental findings have been so sparse that theoretical work has dominated the field…[the theory is so inexact] that you can get almost any result you want just by tweaking [a few numbers].”

What’s the big deal, right? Rings & chains instead of tetrahedrons? Life runs on water, and determining its true structure could rewrite key concepts in the biology books. Such new concepts could revolutionize existing industries, create new ones, and – hopefully – encourage more of us to question a lot more of the knowledge we accept as fact.