Liquid Death is killing it
A new round of financing values the company at $700M and talking heads are LOSING it.
Why is a 4 year old company that sells Austrian spring water in tall boys that look like something a 14 year old would drink behind a 7-Eleven in 1995 being valued at $700M? I don’t know, why was a company offering co-working spaces for hip Millennials valued $47B a few years ago? Unlike everyone on Twitter and LinkedIn I haven’t suddenly become a company valuation expert. What I will do is offer you my thoughts based on what I am indeed an expert in, brands, because there are lessons to be gleaned here.
What is a… Liquid Death?
Truthfully, I knew of Liquid Death’s existence but didn’t care one bit about it until a few weeks ago when I found out one of its founders had worked at the same agency I work at now. I think bottled water is a massive scam and a very problematic industry both in terms of plastic pollution (Liquid Death’s founders agree) and in terms of massive corporations owning water sources1. I see access to clean potable water as a fundamental human right. Now that we’ve established my woke credentials, let’s go back to discussing Liquid Death and why it’s a success story in our consumerist society. Simply put, Liquid Death started as pure mountain spring water in an aluminum can with a heavy metal name and brand:
The mission behind the brand is simple:
Water is good for you, much better than energy/sugary/alcoholic drinks, and aluminum is basically infinitely recyclable as opposed to plastic (which is probably not recyclable at all despite all we’ve been told). To get you to drink more water, they’ve created a brand and product (packaging really) that stands out and makes drinking water cool again(?).
Increasingly curious about this seemingly nonsensical brand, a couple of weeks ago I listened to a great episode of the On Strategy ShowCase podcast about it by Fergus O’Carroll:
The episode does a great job explaining how Liquid Death came to be and how it behaves as a brand, highly recommend it if you really want to go a bit deeper. It opened my eyes to a standout brand I’ve since been reading more and more about.
Some of my favorite parts (I paraphrase):
The idea for Liquid Death started as a joke piece of content and they think of every new campaign as an SNL skit
The product/packaging was designed to inspire people to drink water while still looking cool, the way alcoholic drinks do
Their creative success comes from resurrecting all the ideas that died when they worked agency side
They’re happy when 50% of consumers love their campaigns and the other 50% hate them
Everything they do is designed to “win the internet” that day
To summarize it, Liquid Death started as a joke about the bullshit of the bottled water industrial complex, turned into a real product with a serious claim for a more sustainable way to consume “bottled” water, which has since expanded into sparkling and flavored seltzer.
What about their Marketing?
Word of caution, their Marketing is brilliant, but please read the entire newsletter before you go running to your agency or creative team shouting “we need a Liquid Death strategy!”
Here’s their launch video:
My favorite recent piece they did, blind tasting their new flavored water vs “the world’s most expensive drinks”, I won’t spoil it, it’s genius:
They also ran a Super Bowl ad in 2022:
There’s so many more, some I loved, some I liked, some I hated, check them all out here: Timewaster-5000
So, the dreaded “What can brands learn?”
A lot actually, but first and foremost definitely not “go make a punk/heavy metal version of your packaging”. Here are four things I truly believe can be gleaned from their success:
CLARITY
They know exactly what their brand is and who it’s for. More importantly, they don’t care that the brand they’re building isn’t for everyone, they actually celebrate it. Technically the TAM for water is every single human being on the planet. That would push a lot of brand managers to create the broadest and most vanilla brand possible. These guys went the opposite way, they found a niche and built a brand for it, one that could also grow beyond that niche.
They also have a noble purpose, kill plastic pollution. They do talk about this but it isn’t their main message, because they’ve understood, unlike many other brands who posture, that while people do care about purpose, it comes after the 4 Ps. If your product and brand aren’t attractive and available to consumers, no amount of Purpose (not a 5th P…) will make them buy it. This to me is an absolutely critical point in the debate about Purpose, one that I will dive deeper into at a future date.
DISTINCTIVENESS
Everything they do from a Marketing perspective, from the packaging to their advertising, is designed to stand out. Water is probably one of the most boring categories you can think of, it’s literally just water. Every other brand is either talking about how their water is the purest or adding shit to the water to make it “smart”. Can you name a single water brand’s ad? Packaging is the only thing that’s probably where most water brands look to be distinctive of each other, but none of them quite as much as Liquid Death.
HUMOR
I’ve talked about how our industry has lost its sense of humor a few weeks ago, a trend I will be very happy to see reversed if it’s the only thing other brands take from Liquid Death:
Humor is hard, but it’s a fantastic way to stand out and be somewhat memorable. If this brand’s success doesn’t wake you up and make you want to stop making the same vanilla ads about how your brand/product is helping people live their best lives, bla bla bla, then nothing will. Liquid Death chose a particular type of humor that works for them, there are many other types, hell, you don’t even have to be “Laugh Out Loud” funny, you can just try to be witty, make your audience smile at least.
FUTURE PROOFED
Whether intentionally or not at first, the brand and positioning they built has allowed them to eventually extend beyond still water into sparkling, and more recently flavored seltzer, a huge market worth an estimated $17.2B in 20212. They've also created a whole merchandising division that naturally came out of the brand they've built. No idea how much revenue it generates but I'm sure it's got a lot of potential, would you buy an Evian trucker hat and wear it at a concert? The brand Liquid Death could extend in so many directions, and that's why ultimately I think it got the $700M valuation.
I’ve read so many terrible takes about this valuation dismissing this as “people love their bouji water”. Liquid Death isn’t for everyone, and that’s why it’s a really interesting brand to follow. So many brand managers are afraid to make their brands stand out, be funny, relatable, and have a personality. If you take anything away from this analysis it’s that if you’re one of them, you need to wake up.
My friend Philip Oakley also wrote a brilliant LinkedIn post about it if you want to read more.