Mark Ritson sparked debate this week by dismissing the Liquid Death brand as being of “minuscule size“, “built from packaging and promotion, and little else“. His more serious gripe was that admiration of the brand, including our post here, showed that marketers today are only interested in advertising (1). Liquid Death was “the perfect pin-up brand for a generation of marketers who define marketing as advertising and spend their careers ignoring the remaining 90% of our discipline’s hinterland.“
In this post, I suggest Mark misses the mark on Liquid Death, is overly negative about today’s marketers but hits the bullseye on the importance of product.
Mark misses the mark: Liquid Death
First, let’s look at Mark Ritson’s dismissal of the Liquid Death brand. It is this part of his column that provoked the reaction he was looking for on Linked In, with piles of people either violently disagreeing or agreeing with him.
Issue 1: “The minuscule size of the brand”
Mark Ritson complains that Liquid Death’s positive coverage is way out of proportion versus the “minuscule” size of the brand. “$263m in revenue. Coke does that every 72 hours,” he wrote. He’s right to urge caution about getting too excited about a brand yet to fully prove itself. But dismissing it as minuscule by comparing it to Coke seems a bit silly.
First, Liquid Death has only been on the market for five years, whereas Coke’s been around for more than a century. Second, Coca Cola is a truly global brand, whereas Liquid Death is mainly sold in the US and the UK. Third, the cola market is bigger than the bottled water market.
Looking at the US bottled water market is a better way of assessing Liquid Death’s size (2). Here, it is already c. 1/3 the size of the biggest spring water brand, Glaceau Smart Water, which has retail sales of $860m (assuming most of Liquid Death’s are in the US). This is pretty good going, given that Smart Water has had 28 year of marketing support from Coca Cola and Liquid Death is a new “challenger brand”.
Issue 2: “It’s all about the ads… attitude… social… events. And nothing else“
Mark Ritson’s second issue is that Liquid Death is built on advertising alone. Again, he uses a silly comparison to make his point, in this case Tesla. In the car category there is a massive opportunity to “bake your brand in” to your product via distinctive design. The same goes for Apple. Many people focus on the role of emotion in Apple’s success, but product is at the heart of their growth, as I posted on here.
However, in packaged water there is much less opportunity for product differentiation given that few people, if any, can taste the difference between products. Given this category constraint, I’d argue that Liquid Death have done a pretty good job at driving distinctiveness. The visual identity and communication play key roles but they are not the only success factors. Founder Mike Cessario certainly seems to take product much more seriously than Mark suggests.“The only way the brand would have a chance of survival is if the actual product itself was insanely interesting,” he told CNBC (3).
First, the brand’s positioning, Murder Your Thirst, is rooted in a functional benefit. This positioning is actually more product focused than that of Evian, the world’s leading bottled spring water brand: Live Young is about a life attitude, with the brand’s product story secondary (see below). The brand has also used core range extension to add new flavours, all executed with highly distinctive names, such as Mango Chainsaw and Severed Lime.
Liquid Death also drives distinctiveness through the packaging material, using cans instead of plastic bottles. This helps the brand stand out and also makes the packaging easily recyclable. The pack shape is also distinctive, using the tall shape of energy drinks like Monster to borrow codes from a more edgy, exciting market.
Issue 3: “Entirely more famous among marketers than the market it targets“
Liquid Death would have been unable to build a quarter of a billion dollar brand by building fame only with the marketing community. Also, the brand needs a degree of fame to support the hefty price premium it supports versus own label brands of packaged water (see example of pricing vs Walmart own label below).
Overly negative on today’s marketers
Mark’s bigger, much more important point was that today’s marketers have zero interest in product. “Liquid Death’s fame shows how badly marketers neglect product,” he wrote. “It’s typical that marketers fawn over a brand built through promotion and packaging, when they ought to focus on their role in improving the thing they sell.” This point seems to have been overlooked by most of the 100+ people commenting on Linked In.
I’m less negative than Mark about today’s marketers. It seems an exaggeration to suggest that an entire generation of marketers “define marketing as advertising and spend their careers ignoring the remaining 90% of our discipline’s hinterland.” Most of the marketers I meet on brandgym projects want to work on all aspects of the marketing mix including the product, even when this is hard to do, such as in complex service businesses. What they need are principles and practical tools to help make product a ket part of their brand building and marketing, I suggest.
Mark hits the mark: championing the role of product
I’m 110% in agreement on the need to ensure marketing teams focus on their product. I’ve been banging the drum for product’s role in marketing since our very first blog post back in 2006, entitled “Never mind the sizzle, where’s the sausage? Building brands based on substance not spin” (where “sausage” = product and “sizzle” = emotion). This has often felt like a lonely battle, so its great to have Mark also championing the role of product.
More recently, we wrote a post here with 10 ways to build brands on substance not spin. And below I share some tips on how to do this, used to help 100s of marketers on brandgym projects and our Mastering Brand Growth program.
Tip 1: champion the idea of “brand-led business”
There is still a misperception in many businesses that branding is only about creating an “image wrapper” with advertising and logo design. Examples I have posted on include Evri, Abrdn and Uber. This is especially true in complex service businesses, where product development is usually separate from the marketing function. Here, the challenge for marketing leaders is to champion the idea of “brand-led business”, where brand is the central, driving force for everything a business does (see below).
The team we worked with on the Momentum insurance brand are an example of this approach. The marketing team created a cross-functional project, including leaders from the various “product houses” that design and sell the different insurance products, such as life cover and health protection. This team worked on how to drive the Momentum brand positioning of Your Journey to Success through the whole business including the product offers.
Tip 2: understand your position on the “product sausage spectrum”
The opportunity to use product to drive distinctiveness does vary by category. We can consider categories sitting on a “sausage spectrum”! At one end are categories with complex, multi-dimensional products where product should play a key role, such as cars, mobile phones and computers. Tesla and Apple sit here, as discussed earlier. Most service brands also sit here, with the opportunity to create “service signatures” that bring the brand to life, like the Lux* hotel brand I posted on here.
At the other end of the spectrum are categories where products are simpler and more similar, such as bottled water. Here, a watch out is to avoid using the term “commodity”, a word we ban on brandgym projects. This sort of thinking is defeatist and assumes zero opportunity for product to play a role. I posted here how even in a category as basic as clingfilm there is an opportunity for a distinctive product offer (see below).
In the middle is where most consumer goods categories sit. Here, creating and amplifying product distinctiveness is possible with the right level of commitment and investment. Recent posts on how to do this include Heinz, Coke and Tyrell’s, with a visual below on how this brand beautifully blends sausage and sizzle.
Tip 3: leave the ladder in the garage
I recommend caution when using the concept of “brand laddering”, suggesting that you “leave the ladder in the garage” in this post. Laddering involves working up from attributes to functional benefits to emotional benefits and then focusing your marketing at this higher level. The risk is losing touch with the reality of your product roots, as brilliantly illustrated by Tom Fishburne’s cartoon below. This is especially important when working on a social mission, to ensure that this has a tight link to your core product. Corona is an example of getting this right, as I posted on here. Their Protect Paradise initiative to clean up beaches is directly linked to their brand positioning about the beach lifestyle and attitude.
I suggest a better approach is to ensure your product “sausage” (product) and emotional “sizzle” (emotional values) work together, with one reinforcing the other. Taking Magnum as an example, the emotional benefits of pleasure and indulgence flow directly from the product attributes. And the product plays a heroic role in communication, with the cracking sound when you bite into the ice cream being a distinctive brand asset. I’ve posted on many other brand example of sausage and sizzle over the years, including one on a sausage brand, The Jolly Hog!
Tip 4: dig for brand truths
If you want to work on how to get product back to the heart of your marketing, a useful step is to “dig for brand truths”. Each of these is a different source of truth about your brand, linked to the product, that could be the basis for your brand positioning and marketing (see below). We posted recently here on how the Tango brand had re-connected with a brand truth related to “the hit of the real fruit”, after a period when it only focused on emotion.
Tip 5: renovate the core
A key part of growing the core is to work on product renovation. This is an important point in Mark Ritson’s column, but one that didn’t land with many people given the focus on his take-down of Liquid Death. “It’s not new product development; call it ‘existing product improvement’. But this more gradual, ongoing product work is probably more important,” he wrote. Examples we’ve posted on include Amazon, Milk & More and Pukka Pies.
Tip 6: tell a product story with emotion
Once you have built a positioning based on brand truths, you then need a bit of creative magic. The challenge is to tell a product story in an emotionally compelling way. I love the mantra of ad agency McCann which sums this up: “The truth well told”. In a recent post we explored how the Axe/Lynx brand have done this, creating a polarising but effective communication campaign called The New Axe Effect. After a few years focusing at a high, emotional level the team have reconnected with the product truth about fragrances that make you confident and attractive. In one execution, The Robbery, a female robber tries to hold up a café, only to be distracted by the smell of the young guy working in there, thanks to the Lynx Effect (see below).
In conclusion, Liquid Death is not as hollow a brand as Mark Ritson suggests. More importantly, he’s right to bang the drum for building brands based on substance, not spin. Hopefully, this blog will inspire marketers use our examples of brands combining sausage and sizzle, rather than Mark’s pessimistic prediction that they’ll use “some other non-product-based marketing exemplar to justify their partial, superficial approach to marketing“!
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