History

The criticism from Alexandria in Egypt in 1878 was that the packaging, though not the current packaging, was dated and not equal to that of the competition and for this reason reduced its popularity.

The country of Styria, which at that time owned the distribution rights of Rogaška took care, through its own business measures, to ensure that the mineral water from Rogaška Slatina (as an important source of income) always had a suitable position in the market place and that it also had, besides its protecting packaging, the manufactured product trademark. Today, therefore, the third most sold mineral water in the world is, with the story of its bottling, distribution, advertising, return policy, the establishing of its trademark and of its position in the market place a never-ending source of knowledge about the history of marketing in Slovenia.

Already from the middle of the 19^th century, the advertising campaigns aimed at the European and non-European markets were a regular practice of the country's Health Spa Resort, when today's competition to Slovenian mineral waters hadn't even been discovered. The present slogans "For Health" and "Before use only pour into a glass" are the successors of previous slogans and are a clearly marked concept of seeing Rogaška as a natural source of health and beauty. The theme of the Rogaška advertisements is from the discovery of Donat in the first decade of the 20^th century and is associated with a healthy lifestyle and the romanticism of spacious spas. From the twentieth year of the 20^th century a picture predominated in the advertisements of a woman leaning towards the glass of Rogaška - her image changing over the decade, as the unsettling times were changing in the first half of the 20^th century - as the dawn's light falls over her image she twists into the silent retreat of the resigned European faced with an age of totalitarianism. During the first sixty years of the 20^th century, with an upturn in sales of Rogaška, the most beautiful of the Greek gods Apollo Belvedere symbolised the health which Rogaška bought in the sixties of the 20^th century. The decision to use his image resulted from the legend produced on the title page of Roitschocrene, the first monograph dedicated to Rogaška in 1685. According to the legend, Apollo tried to persuade the winged Pegasus into drinking Rogaška water instead of water from his own spring on the mythological Mount Helikon. His image still remains on Donat today, but the yellow label and stopper have not been preserved, both of which characterised Donat up to the eighties of the previous century. The decision to use the yellow colour was not coincidental, as with it they wanted to revive a tiny part of the Donat image as it was bottled directly after its discovery in 1908.

The images are held in the Historical archives at Celje