Gaining early adopters is a critical step in the early growth stages of any beverage startup. Canned water maker Liquid Death, however, has faced a certain amount of skepticism even among the many people who appreciated its unorthodox approach to the category: a lot of them thought it was fake.
“People [who saw the brand’s announcement video] didn’t believe that the product is real — I think that’s a good sign,” said founder Mike Cessario, speaking to BevNET yesterday ahead of the brand’s official launch online today.
If you’ve seen Liquid Death’s satirical announcement video, you might understand audiences’ initial disbelief. Conceived and executed as a side project by Cessario, a Los Angeles-based creative director and a co-founder of Western Grace Brandy, the video, created to support a 2017 crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, plays like a premium water commercial viewed through a fun house mirror. A spokesperson decries how marketing executives have turned water into “some girly drink for yoga moms” when it is actually the most deadly drink on earth. “Water is not yoga,” the spokesperson claims, while pouring out a can. “Water is liquid death.”
“Everybody is trying to make something unique that nobody has ever seen before, but in reality they are all very common,” Cessario said of the video’s reception. “The fact that people didn’t even think Liquid Death was real was a good sign that we had stumbled on to something that most people had never seen before.”
Though the crowdfunding campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, the video left its mark, generating over 1 million views on Facebook in less than two months. The question now facing Cessario and the Liquid Death team is if the brand’s online buzz and subversive approach can translate into real consumer dollars. Available exclusively in 12-packs for $19.99 for one-time purchase ($17.99 for subscription), Liquid Death is now for sale on the brand’s website and on Amazon. To bolster things in the real world, single 16.9 oz. tallboy cans priced at $1.80 will also be sold in limited distribution at select bars, tattoo parlors and venues in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
In the months since the video was released, the company has worked to structure itself in preparation for the official launch. It has partnered with early stage CPG investor and incubator Science Inc., which Cessario said was providing financial and operational guidance to the brand. In addition, Alex Bogusky, chief creative engineer at Boulder, Colo.-based creative agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, has joined as an advisor, while media entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck is an investor.
The brand has also fine-tuned its aggressive aesthetic in preparation for its full retail launch. The original positioning of water as “deadly” has pivoted towards encouraging consumers to drink the product as a way to “Murder Your Thirst,” which is the company’s tagline. The original call out to “100 percent Bone Chilling Spring Water” on the package has also been changed to “mountain water.” Cessario acknowledged that the brand’s bold identity and voice will likely engage or turn off potential customers in equal measure, entirely by design.
“We learned what we thought from the beginning — this product, like most disruptive products, is polarizing,” he said. “The people who love it really love it. The other half just don’t get it. It was never supposed to be a product that makes everybody happy. For us, it’s easy to see: anybody who’s into heavy metal music will instantly love this brand. We know the people who would like it, the people who would appreciate this kind of humor, and it is resonating really well with them.”
Cessario is adamant that, even with its tongue-in-cheek branding, Liquid Death, which is sourced from a spring in Austria, can compete with premium water brands and that its use of more sustainable aluminum can packaging will bring added consumer appeal. Yet at the same time, the product itself is a sly subversion — if not outright rejection — of many of the trends fueling double-digit growth in the water category.
“What we hear from industry people often is ‘Liquid Death is just a marketing gimmick, it’s just water.’ But smartwater is just water,” Cessario said. “That’s just a marketing gimmick in itself. There’s nothing smart about it — it’s a label. It’s a myth wrapped around a thing. So is Voss Water, so is Fiji. At the end of the day, water is just one of those categories where studies shows people are not buying brands off taste or specific benefits as much as they are on brand.”
With no immediate line extensions planned for the near-term, the company will be focusing on further developing its marketing voice and style. To promote the launch, Liquid Death is running an online promotion in which consumers can e-sign a contract (drafted by an attorney, Cessario noted) to “sell your soul” to the company in exchange for a free can. Like the product itself, the promotion is designed to rise above the noise and spark the curiosity of consumers inundated with constant streams of information and advertising, whether they’re water drinkers and heavy metal fans or not.
“I think a lot of marketing is still playing by rules from the 1950s and they are forgetting that your content on social media is not only competing with other brands — it is competing against influencers and movies and any other thing that can possibly be in someone’s feed,” he said. “There’s a lot of pressure to make something insanely interesting, to really understand how high the bar really is for what is considered interesting to most people. I think it’s really fun to have this challenge and actually build something and use these things to push a product where the marketing is actually baked into the product.”