From its absurdist humor, on-the-nose name and bottle designs featuring colorful “critters” like naked mole rats and seagulls with beefy muscle-man arms, bottled water maker GEN Z Brands is well aware it may come off as a joke.
But the Arkansas-based company is getting serious; led by a team of industry veterans, the brand is rolling out into select Target stores this month as it dials-in on sales and marketing ahead of broader scaling efforts next year.
GEN Z launched last year via ecommerce with whimsical and deeply ironic branding and messaging, declaring its flagship bottled water a “flavorless transparent liquid” made by “real boomers” proudly pandering to young consumers. As CMO Erin Campbell told BevNET at the time of the launch, GEN Z Water aims to break through zoomers’ ultra-high “B.S. meters” with tongue-in-cheek messaging that calls attention to its own marketing tactics, while at the same time touting a legitimate mission around sustainability and reducing the amount of single-use plastic bottles.
Speaking this week, roughly 18 months after the initial online launch, Campbell said the brand is beginning to see its “hypothesis come to life” as it expands its retail presence to around 500 stores across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Southern California, with a goal of quadrupling its footprint in 2023.
“While [the branding] feels chaotic, everything was rooted in data,” Campbell said. “One of the key data points about Gen Z, the generation, is they buy from, respect, and have relationships with brands that have a purpose and a value beyond simply making money. So we are really intentional about driving our purpose of leaving nothing behind but a smile.”
GEN Z’s waters are packaged in refillable 20 oz. aluminum bottles, following a trend of bottled water startups like PATH and Proud Source Water that have aimed to disrupt the traditional beverage CPG business model of single-use packaging by encouraging consumers to reuse their bottles indefinitely.
According to CEO Doug Batie, retailers have more often had a harder time grappling with the refillable part of the brand’s positioning more than the irreverent name and packaging. But as consumers of all ages place more importance on sustainability, he said buyers are beginning to embrace the product.
The brand is primarily sold in convenience stores currently, including 60 Oklahoma City OnCue accounts, and is now adding 200 Target stores across its current states, Batie said. While GEN Z expects its top channels with “slowly morph” into mass and grocery accounts as it grows, Batie said c-store currently “makes the most sense” for the brand as the bottle “works extremely hard” to stand on shelf “behind the lights and in a sea of plastic.”
The decision to take a slow approach to retail geography mostly based in the South is allowing GEN Z to show it’s more than a gimmick before it begins aggressive pushes in larger markets. The company is currently establishing a DSD network of independent beer houses and, Batie said, is more than happy to build a strong sales foundation under the radar before going bigger and louder with its marketing.
“We’ve got a hypothesis that people were going to get to the point of understanding refillability, that they were going to slowly understand that we’re an easy replacement for a Hydro Flask that only costs $3, not $50, when you lose it,” Batie said. “Since that’s the case, for us to go everywhere way too fast we would have to bankroll a lot of money. And so we’re trying to make the most of the money we do have available, but also go prove this before we go scale.”
Batie, the former VP for Walmart, Sam’s Club and National Ecommerce at juice producer Welch’s, has also brought on experienced CPG veterans to guide the strategy. Batie’s colleague Neil Mellers, formerly Welch’s national account manager for omnichannel, serves as GEN Z’s chief of growth and Jennifer Batie, former national account manager at Cal Western Packaging Corp., is head of people and purpose. Campbell, meanwhile, came to GEN Z from shopper marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi X where she was SVP, Strategy and Digital.
The company has also retained a revolving “Gen Z Council” of actual zoomers to advise daily on major decisions, from social media posts to new bottle designs, in order to ensure the brand stays on top of the latest trends and attitudes of its target demographic. According to Campbell, the council – recruited from marketing classes at the University of Arkansas and through social media platforms like TikTok – now has around seven to nine members at any given time (up from three last year).
“We know the Gen Z generation is really big on authenticity … but we know we can’t do it in a truly authentic way – being millennials, Gen Xers and Boomers – as a true Gen Zer can,” Campbell said. “I mean, I can look up all the data that we want; all the numbers, all the percentage points. But unless you live and breathe this generation, you’re going to miss out on the tonal nuances.”
It should come as no surprise that a major influence on GEN Z has been Liquid Death. The canned water company’s rocketship growth, anticipating over $130 million in sales this year, and its $700 million valuation have come in large part from its unique, marketing-first approach to brand building. Like GEN Z, Liquid Death has leaned into irony and wit with a similar tongue-in-cheek vibe.
“They’re helping us pave the road,” Batie said. “When we saw their Super Bowl ad, we all called each other and we were excited. We weren’t fearful, we were excited about that, because it’s showing the category is beginning to emerge. And that’s what the data was showing us two years ago.”
However, unlike GEN Z, which has turned to students to craft its messaging, much of Liquid Death’s edgy sense of humor and willingness to offend some auidiences has stemmed from the personality and hardcore music background of its founder Mike Cessario. While both water brands have tied their irreverent imagery to an environmentally-friendly anchor, GEN Z’s emphasis on bright and sunny identity seeks to offer a differentiated approach.
Beverage marketing veteran Lewis Goldstein, former EVP of marketing for dairy co-op Organic Valley, has long embraced humor in marketing and worked directly with Mike Cessario for the milk maker’s 2015 “Save the Bros” campaign. Though he said he was only familiar with GEN Z through its website, Goldstein told BevNET that he believed Liquid Death has broken new ground in beverage marketing by taking consumers’ expectations for how water is advertised “to another level.” But in other ways, the brand still adhering to traditional brand building playbooks and expanding on the ground laid by older marketing campaigns such Smartwater’s commercials with actress Jennifer Aniston.
In the case of GEN Z, Goldstein suggested that the brand is in a good position by not taking itself too seriously, but was unsure if it will connect with its target audience or not. He warned it “takes a lot of skill,” creativity and “guts” to help a brand break out beyond novelty and become something that resonates deeply with consumers, and for GEN Z proving its authenticity will be essential.
“It doesn’t matter if the product is milk or water, that type of marketing is meant to appeal to people who appreciate pulling back the curtain, and brands being wacky and not taking themselves seriously,” Goldstein said. “There’s too many brands that take themselves too seriously.”