In The New York Times Magazine: Pur Flavor Options

TAP DANCE
Want to stand out in a category that’s all about subtracting? Add something.

This week in Consumed, Pur Flavor Options, which allow you to add flavor to filtered tap water.

It may seem surprising, then, that a filter maker would attempt a kind of jujitsu move on the notion of purity: What if you took water with all the bad stuff screened out and . . . added something to it? …

But if Flavor Options suggests that progress on the front lines in the marketplace is incremental, it also offers proof of just how resistant the marketplace can be to limits. At a certain point, you would think, the race to purity gets won; eventually, you cannot get purer than pure. And yet, just as you can never actually drive to the horizon, the end point of “new and improved” simply does not exist.

Read the column in the January 11, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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