Small social media content often consumes as many resources as major campaigns
Mike Cessario · Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario: How I Turned Canned Water to a $700M Company | E968 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jan 20, 2023 · at 52:38
Mike Cessario is the founder and CEO of Liquid Death, known for viral marketing. He addresses the hidden overhead and low return on high-frequency social posting.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 like a home run.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mike Cessario
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 …”
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.”
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…”
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…”
Liquid Death surpassed Aquafina's social following in just four months
“In four months, we have more social followers than Awkwafina.”
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.”