Insight
Truly beloved brands must accept being deeply hated by other consumers
“Like, I always say, it's like, if you, if there are people who truly love something, there has to be people who truly hate it. It is not possible to make something that Everybody loves. All it's possible is to make something that everybody doesn't really give …”
What-if
Liquid Death would never have survived a Coca-Cola focus group
“Like Liquid Death would have never made it through a focus group at Coca-Cola.”
Insight
Brand identity is a CPG startup's only true defensible moat
“But the brand is what you can truly own, and that really is your moat, more so than most brands think it is. They think their moat is an ingredient, or they think it's something else. It's not really. It's like anybody can replicate your formula It's your bran…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Beverage competitors sabotage rivals by peeling inventory stickers off stockroom cases
“Beverage competitors were coming and pulling those stickers off their competitors' cases, so when the guy came over to try to scan it, he couldn't scan it. He's got a lot of shit to do. He's not gonna go all the way to the back and go print out new stuff. He's…”
Insight
Small social media content often consumes as many resources as major campaigns
“The reality is doing a little thing often takes as much time and headache and even budget sometimes is a big thing. And it's like, you have all these things to manage and it's sucking everybody's time up and You know, by design, most of it's not going to be li…”
Assertion Supported
Liquid Death surpassed Aquafina's social following in just four months
“In four months, we have more social followers than Awkwafina.”
Opinion
Traditional CPG investors struggle to value early digital brand traction
“When we talk to more investor types on the traditional CPG side, they don't typically understand the digital. Social world as strongly. So they didn't know how to value some of this stuff as much as maybe the tech world kind of did in the early days.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Monster Energy's core buyers are truck drivers, not extreme action athletes
“The core monster customer who buys the most monster are not skateboarders and action sports athletes and all these people that. You see in their marketing, it's, you know overweight guy outside of Riverside who drives a truck or something like that.”
Insight
Cessario: Marketing is rapid communication, not high-level storytelling
“Marketing is not storytelling. Really? I think it's a lower form of it. So I think it's more about communication, I guess, which I think is a little different than storytelling.”
Insight
Marketing functional benefits like low calories fails to build brand affinity
“Then these other brands that are just marketing with functional benefits. Oh, less calories, less grams of sugar, better tasting, you know, all of those things, like they don't actually resonate brand affinity.”
Insight
Over-reliance on data testing is destroying modern advertising creativity
“I think a big part of it, and this is, you know, a guess, is the current, two things, the current state of data. People are trying to make too many decisions based on data, rather than insight of what's funny. It used to be like people in an agency were saying…”
Insight
Irrational fear of fringe social media outrage forces brands into boring marketing
“And then I think the other part of it is the current state of social media. The fact that if one person doesn't like your commercial, they can go make a bunch of noise on your brand social page about it, and now the brand is like, oh, two people said they hate…”
Disclosure
Liquid Death structures its marketing department like Saturday Night Live
“We think about our marketing team more like we are Saturday Night Live. You know, like, Saturday Night Live has a group of professional writers, comedians, who are writing these funny skits day in and day out. They have celebrity guests that come in. You have …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liquid Death spent only $100,000 producing its Super Bowl commercial
“Even the Superbowl commercial that we did, that was the beer commercial with the kids. I think all in, we spent a hundred grand on that commercial when other companies are spending millions of dollars.”
Insight
CPG branding fails in retail without dedicated in-store merchandising teams
“The marketing and brand makes people love the product, but that's just the beginning. Then it's like when you're in the store, when a store orders product, oh, we need more liquid debt. They order liquid debt. A distributor comes, drops cases off in the back o…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jan 2028
Liquid Death aims to become a multi-billion dollar beverage-entertainment hybrid
“I like to think that we're, you know, Not that far off from what you see in a brand like Monster or Red Bull, you know, just a, you know, much bigger brand known for sort of blurring the lines between being an entertainment company and a beverage brand. Like, …”
Insight
Junk food dominates fun marketing while healthy products target older demographics
“All the junk food does all the fun marketing. Healthy stuff is very quiet. You know, they more market to like an older demographic. They don't do anything fun”
Assertion Supported
Harley-Davidson targets affluent professionals like dentists, not actual biker gangs
“When Harley is doing their marketing, they're not targeting biker gangs. They're marketing to dentists, like people that can afford a 25,000 dollar motorcycle”
Assertion Contradicted
Four conglomerates control 98% of the retail beverage market
“Four or five big players literally own 98% of the market between Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors. I mean, that is 98% of the beverages you see on a shelf in a store anywhere.”
Insight
Weak marketing ideas require expensive production value to capture audience attention
“When you have a really good idea, you could film it with an iPhone sometimes, and it'll actually still be good. But when you have an idea that's not very good, you have to start throwing all this production value at it to have something that people care about,…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Liquid Death shifted its marketing from a Netflix to an HBO model
“We've Kind of dramatically changed our approach to content and not to slander either of these two companies. It's just two different strategies. Moving more from the Netflix approach to the HBO approach”
What-if
A standard Tony Hawk trick video would have generated zero social engagement
“If we would have just posted a video of Tony Hawk doing a crazy skate trick, it would have gotten no engagement on our social, but we found a funny way to use him where we take his blood and mix it into ink that we printed limited edition skateboards with and …”
Insight
Beverage startups are highly capital intensive and require massive scale for profitability
“You're almost constantly raising as a startup, especially in beverage that's very capital intensive. It's like, you have to get to a certain level before A beverage company can become profitable unless you're selling a nine dollar can of something that's got 8…”
Assertion Supported
Monster Energy secretly gave Warped Tour bands water in Monster cans
“They made cans of monster that looked exactly like monster, but it just had water in it. And they would give that to the bands to drink. It was not for sale.”
