Some Killer Lessons from Liquid Death
Many thanks to Jon Evans, at System1, and of course Mike Cessario, founder of Liquid Death. To see the full article click here.
“It was better not knowing the rules” and I think that’s why so often people from outside a category succeed. It’s something Adam Morgan, in his book Eating The Big Fish, calls “intelligent naivety”, and it shows the value that category inexperience can bring in helping you imagine something completely new.
“The opposite of a good idea can be a better idea.” By asking what the dumbest possible idea was, the company actually came up with a better way to sell water. As Cessario says, it set itself the task of inventing the worst name imaginable and starting to imagine how that brand would look. “If we had come up with something too obvious, then the chances are everyone else would have already been doing it.”
“Ideas themselves are worth zero dollars”; it’s the ability to execute that makes them valuable.
“Marketing is an attention game – you can either pay for it or create it”
Entertain for commercial gain. “Our way to entertain people is with comedy and we make people laugh better than anyone”. The brand set the bar very high when recruiting people to the team, because “anyone can make an ad, but few can make a hit comedy.”
“If your brand owns a functional benefit then you don’t have a brand”