Bottled water behemoth Evian sells its modish 99-cent half-liter bottles of water with a lifestyle to match. Whether it’s staging a party at a New York City hotspot like Commune, or sponsoring conservation projects such as the World Wildlife Fund, Evian wants consumers to believe its product is more than just H2O. Because of its clever marketing, teens and college students are sipping Evian’s odorless, colorless and tasteless beverage in classrooms, fitness centers, restaurants and shopping malls. Evian is keeping its grip on these health-conscious customers, and recruiting new ones, with Evian.com -- which is not as plain and simple as the product it represents.

Catering to its target audience of Gen-X and Gen-Y technophiles, Evian.com sparkles like a navel ring in a discotheque. Besides sending customer feedback or reviewing product information, Evian.com visitors can read a feature on professional female skateboarder Jaime Reyes, play a mindless game of “count the empties,” or win prizes by answering Evian trivia questions. Rich media features such as animation and streaming audio and video enliven the user experience and help Evian.com, which went up in 1996 and re-launched in May of 1999, stand out.

“Evian is a water, but it is Evian water and it comes from a unique place on the planet [Evian-les-Bains, France] and has an identity because of that,” says Michael Newirth, director of corporate communications at Evian. “Evian.com is another means of talking with consumers and answering their questions. Our strategy was to bring Evian.com to life.”

In developing its Web strategy, Evian decided to jump ahead of the bandwidth curve. Rather than re-design Evian.com for the lowest common denominator (users with slow modems and old browsers), Evian bucked conventional wisdom and tailored its online offering for high-end computer users with broadband Internet connections (100Kbps or higher). Newirth would not disclose Evian.com’s pricetag, but he says the cost of Evian’s broadband investment is roughly equivalent to what it spends on public relations, which is “considerably less” than the $10-$20 million spent on marketing in traditional media channels (print, radio and television).

Yet, the real cost of this move may not be measured in the dollars and cents that Evian shelled out for its website’s bells and whistles, but rather in the estimated 58 million dial-up (56Kbps or slower) subscribers in the United States that the website could alienate. Rich media sites like Evian.com tend to choke on typical modem connections because their audio, video and animation require high loads of data to be transferred within a few seconds. Dial-up users may not have the patience to wait for all that Evian.com is offering to load, and therefore go elsewhere.

Evian.com is willing to take that risk. The company is aiming for a narrow, affluent audience that is beginning to bulge. Broadband users, for the time being, tend to be more affluent than dial-up users, according to a recent report by broadband service provider Excite@Home. The average gross household income of broadband users was $77,000 in 2000,

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