Searching for Meaning in a Can of Nihilist Water
Love it or hate it, we are all responsible for the rise of Liquid Death.
The brand’s motto is “Murder Your Thirst.” They turned online comments from their biggest haters into a series of music albums. They partnered with Martha Stewart to make a $58 candle in the shape of a severed hand. They made and sold a $182 limited edition enema kit (yes, an enema) in partnership with Blink-182 drummer, Travis Barker.
They also have a $700 million valuation with $130 million in annual sales after only 3 years since launching.
Liquid Death is canned water, but stands for so much more. “If you don’t want to drink [alcohol], this is way more fun,” co-founder and CEO Mike Cessario told Bloomberg in an article last year after they secured a $70 million funding round. The company touts its environmental friendliness by using cans, which are more recyclable than plastic bottles*. It aims to get more people to drink water by putting it in a “cool” looking can that has more of a Four Loko vibe rather than a basic bottle of Dasani or Aquafina.
Regardless of what you think of them, they have a huge fan base that’s largely male, which is notable in a female-dominated category, and have amassed 2.2 million followers on Instagram and 4 million on TikTok. While it’s tempting to dismiss the brand as one big stunt designed to make metal head bros feel less insecure about drinking water at a music festival, Liquid Death’s existence is entirely enabled by our collectively insatiable demand for portable water.
The market for bottled water has grown to outlandish proportions. It’s the #1 packaged beverage in the U.S. with more than 1 million bottles sold every minute and even has its own trade association. A cursory listing of popular brands lists 131 different varieties, with just five companies owning 25% of the $270 billion annual global market.
We somehow got neurotic about water consumption and that neurosis played directly into the hands of bottled water marketers. These marketers successfully convinced us that our first world water supply—which many people in and outside of our country would love to have—is impure and needs adulteration to safely drink. Some people have gone so far off the deep end of “tap water is unsafe” that they advocate for drinking “raw water,” which of all the pseudoscience products out there is a contender for the worst offender. Yes, there are glaring instances where the local tap water is unfit for consumption, but in most of America we have perfectly safe water coming out of the faucet.
A Sea of Sameness
The marketing of bottled water is, on average, as flavorless as the water itself. Virtually all of them lean on some aspect of purity, “optimized” pH, or reverse osmosis processing and exist in clear bottles with branding that could have easily been AI generated. This massive sea of sameness that is the water bottle aisle was screaming for something different and Liquid Death shrewdly took things as far away from category norms as humanly possible.
Setting aside for a moment the details of their specific tone of voice, Cessario and his team understand something about the food and beverage market that many brands don’t seem to fully grasp and commit to: logic doesn’t drive most food decisions. “Like every truly large valuable brand, it is all marketing and brand because the reason people choose things 98 percent of the time is not rational. It’s emotional,” Cessario says.
While it doesn’t make sense for most food and beverage brands to adopt Liquid Death’s specifically outlandish vibe, brands trying to differentiate themselves with just facts and statistics could learn something from them. Having a food product with substance that is good for people and planet is important, but if the marketing starts to sound like a lecture or guilt trip, people won’t want it and their impact will be limited. Mission driven brands simply can’t afford to get so caught up in their superior nutrition label or carbon negative footprint that they forget to make people feel something.
It doesn’t take long to realize that the whole Liquid Death schtick is a well-executed gag. Cessario compares the brand to “Saturday Night Live,” and Peter Pham, co-founder of Science Ventures, who led their latest funding round says that the brand has “a wink, nod, nod to them saying, let’s have fun.” It’s a water brand created for lolz and cash.
But if we give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment, it’s a healthy pursuit to get people to drink more water. Even if Liquid Death convinces just one person at a concert to drink 6 waters instead of 6 beers before getting behind the wheel, then it’s done some good in the world. I’m a big fan of getting people to do the right thing for the wrong reasons if it actually gets them to do the right thing and if the wrong reason isn’t a heinous one that harms anyone.
No One Knows What It Means, But Its Provocative
How should we process a world where there is so much shit to buy in the supermarket that you need to adopt a cartoonishly outrageous brand persona to stand out? Legacy bottled water only had so many levers to push to sell its product and when we became numb to those pitches, brands have to resort to ridiculousness to grab attention.
Liquid Death is not the only brand to push the limits of nonsense to stand out. Fast food, dominated by a never-ending variation of burgers, fries, and chicken has Taco Bell and its increasingly insane creations that stretch the legal definition of “taco” to the brink. The hot sauce category, where Tabasco, Sriracha, and Frank’s simply aren’t enough, has grown a freakishly long tail of grotesque brands, like “Red Rectum Revenge XXX Hot Sauce,” which is currently on sale for just $5.95 per 5 ounce bottle. Is it only a matter of time before equally crowded categories like yogurt or nutrition bars resort to similar tactics? Have we become so numb to food marketing that we need something like Chobani Triple-XTreme Ghost Peppers on the Bottom Yogurt™ (wink, wink, fun!) to feel again?
I don’t think a brand like Liquid Death could exist in world with a fledgling bottled water market with just a couple brands. It would feel too extreme and weird if drinking bottled water were a new behavior with a niche audience. We all helped the massive growth of the bottled water market and its monoculture marketing by continuing to buy the products. By doing that, we also inadvertently created the fertile conditions for someone to scream “murder your thirst!” and then have $130 million worth of consumers emphatically reply, “yes, I want that.”
Brand storytelling can get people to transcend logic and not stop to question altruistic claims that are shaky at best, but seem plausible. I don’t think many Liquid Death drinkers will do the research to compare the sustainability of cans to plastic bottles, but they probably feel like they’re doing good because Liquid Death has sold them the oversimplified notion that cans = good, plastic = bad no matter what. And for most consumers that’s all the “facts” they need to close a sale.
I’m no prude, so the fact that a lot of people like to enjoy Liquid Death doesn’t bother me, even though it’s not a product that I particularly want. Who am I to tell you what to eat or drink? We can and should keep things fun in the food world, but we can’t become so preoccupied with fun that we forget our responsibilities. We’re all entitled to go to happy hour every now and then but it becomes a problem if we drink so much that we miss work the next day. Balance is everything. But I wouldn’t want to see a world where irony becomes the standard and brands enter into an arms race for who can have the most outlandish marketing. In a world like this, nihilism rules and everything lacks substance.
Playing The Game The Way It Was Meant To Be Played
Even though I’m critical, I’m not here to bash Liquid Death and blame them for the ills of society or anything like that. There are many worse things than water and iced tea to complain about and their marketing isn’t hurting anyone. Instead, I’m trying to shine a light on the effects of rampant consumerism leading to a brand landscape so crowded that new brands can only stand out with vapid antics instead of real substance. I’m all for competition and fun in a category, but do we really need yet another bottled or canned water when there are more substantial issues to solve in food and beverages?
I think the thing that bothers me the most is that the water bottle category got so incredibly big that it became ripe for satire, which Liquid Death seemingly does. Snowballing demand for something like the bottled water category incentivizes more and more entrepreneurs to come after the huge consumer pie in an effort to make a buck. The bottled water industry also attracts lots of marketing talent who may be better used to make things like climate-smart foods a trending topic, but launching a limited edition celebrity enema kit probably looks better on a resume for some marketing recruiters, disappointingly.
The difference between satire and nihilism is that the former uses irony and humor to make us realize a deeper meaning of the world, while the latter doesn’t aim to enlighten anyone. By definition, nihilism means nothing matters, yet we have a food system that is so closely correlated with health and sustainability outcomes that we can’t afford to throw our hands up in the air and say that nothing matters in food. Liquid Death presents as satire but does it actually convince anyone to rethink how the world works? No. And in a capitalist system where profits rule, does it even need to get people to think about how the world works? Also no.
I don’t blame anyone at Liquid Death for creating what they created. I’m sure they’re nice people who have families to provide for just like you and I. They simply saw an opportunity in the market and went after it, which is a key aspect of the classic American Dream. Cessario and his company are simply playing the capitalist game the way it was meant to be played and they’re doing it quite well. If you want to hate on anything, you should hate the game, not the player.
*A footnote on the sustainability of cans vs plastic bottles: The claim that aluminum cans are more sustainable than plastic bottles is only partially true, as cans perform much better recycled than plastic, but the energy to make a can in the first place is 10x higher than that of plastic. #DeathToPlastic is a worthwhile goal, but only if your primary concern is reducing landfill waste and ocean plastic. If you care more about carbon emissions than plastic waste, then cans are actually worse for the planet according to that rubric. One environmental activist’s definition of “sustainable” can be another activist’s environmental disaster. Like everything in sustainability, there are rarely silver bullets or simple answers.
Footnotes
3 Recent posts from my Substack
3 Highlights from my current reading list
The Incredible Creativity of Deepfakes and the Worrying Future of AI by Tom Graham - TED
Why do we buy what we buy? by Emily Stewart - Vox
The Case for (Briefly) Eating Tons of Ultra-Processed Food by Ashwin Rodrigues - GQ
My email is mike@thefuturemarket.com for questions, comments, consulting, or speaking inquiries.
Great article, Mike [sighs and stares out window contemplating society]
The Spaceballs reference here is spot on.