How Do You Make Water Cool

Let me ask you fist - does bottled water excite you?

It does? - you’re weird!

If it doesn't then you have to hear about Liquid Death. There's this dude who made regular water awesome.

This is the short story of Liquid Death. 

Established in 2019, the canned-water company today:

• has 1.8M Instagram followers

• has 3.5M TikTok followers (and 16M likes)

• secured $200M in total funding

• is valued at $700M

• is expected to make $230M in revenue this year

The Director of Liquid Death, Mike Cassario has marketing chops working at VaynerMedia, and made ads for Netflix, and Nestle so he does understand the market.

How did he get the idea?

Mike’s a punk/metalhead (aww yeah 🤘🤘). He attended 2008 Vans Warped tour and noticed the music festival was heavily sponsored by energy drinks. But the musicians themselves didn’t drink them - instead they poured water in those bottles. 

You’ll notice that the same thing happens to F1 drivers, MotoGP racers, and UFC fighters (they don’t need to spike their heart-rate in the middle of a fu*king war lol)

But how do you make the water cool or even make it popular?

You stamp a badass brand on it. 

And since it’s water which athletes, musicians, and entertainers actually do drink - they can promote it as well. 

Time to test the idea. The origin of LD started when Mike shot a $1500 commercial using a fake cam for an ad and dropped $3,000 on Facebook to see if it works. Check it out:

In 3 months after the ad Liquid Death page got more FB followers than Pepsi has Aquafina users. Great signal. Michael gathered $250k from investors (mostly friends and family) and ordered the first batch of canned water.

Wicked! But do you make the most boring healthy product cool? It’s plain water. It’s not like you’re going to win with quality ingredients…

Well, you have to be super freaking different and make risks.

Here’s what Liquid Death did:

• The name itself - Liquid Death (polarizing af)

• Putting water in a tall boy beer can and slapping a metal skull on it

• Aimed to straight-edge individualist (totally punk rock) 

• Turned something as boring as drinking water into a cult

• Instead of calm colors, LD is using gory metal imaging using mostly black

• Smiling tranquil people in ads? Nope gruesome murder and hell scenes instead

The danger was to completely fail, but the benefit of this move is that you gain all the attention and become its own category. 

For this completely made up Gartner matrix of category Liquid Death is a leader of badassness and healthiness - a neat spot in the market which no-one dared or imagined to enter. 

To be perceived as a badass you have to market like a badass too. Unhealthy brands like fast food, candy, and alcohol has been doing this for years but Liquid Death needed to take it up a notch.

Mike Cessario's own word when it came to marketing were: "Take the healthiest thing you can possibly drink (which is water), and one-up the marketing of all the unhealthy stuff.

Some of the campaigns Liquid Death did:

• Mix Tony Hawk's blood into a can of red paint to produce a limited (thank goodness) edition skateboards

• A Martha Stewart severed hand candle 

• Video of grannies blasting out to death metal

• Baby-namer app which generates your name a killer name

In fact, LD achieved the same level of retail success in 3 years which took energy drink Monster 4 years, and sparkling company Celsius 12 years to achieve. 

What looked like a joke turned into a company that is valued at $700M today. 

Branding Support

Out of $45M in 2021 in revenue, LD made $3m just from selling merch. They've also find success marketing through influencers. What Monster and Red Bull is doing with athletes, Liquid Death is doing it with... comedians!

Stand-up podcasts are littered with cans of Liquid Death!

The success of Liquid Death is solely on branding and marketing.

Is it gimmick? Definitely yes!

Is it going to go way? Most likely.

But in the meantime Liquid Death can get more influencers, get more marketing power, and horizontally develop other product: well what do you know - ice tea and sparkling water is already there.

Summary:

• In a saturated market, build your own category

• Aim for polarization - some people will hate you, but others will love you

• Lean into it

• Find an audience that can push your product

3 Savage Tweets

Putting one of my own just because it's on-topic :D

3 Wicked Songs

Nostalgia-synthy M83 for when you watch reruns of original Full House, a country-style crunchy bluesy stoner track and face-melting, soul crushing aggressiveness of Meshuggah when you shotgun a can of of totally innocent Liquid Death water.

Can you do me a favor? If you liked this week's newsletter, please forward it to one friend who's into tech, marketing, and business.  

🤘🤘

d.