Liquid Death: why a water brand covered in skulls works

Transcript

Imagine this, you're an investor and a guy walks into Pitch's company. It's a bottled water brand. Comes in a beer can, covered in skulls. The slogan is, murder your thirst. Calls it liquid death. What's your first impression here? Sounds like a terrible idea, right? Until you realize just how brilliant it is. This illustrates a principle Seth Godin calls, safe is risky. The idea that playing it safe and marketing might be the most dangerous thing you can do. Just think about the bottled water category for a moment. Most of the brands they communicate the same thing. It's pure, it's fresh, it's natural, it's blah blah blah. Liquid death deliberately broke those conventions and in 2024 they reached evaluation of $1.4 billion. And I think this principle is becoming even more relevant in the age of AI because AI has made it incredibly easy for anyone to create something professional. We've all seen Reels of the AI bros, coal calling, gardeners and plumbers and bakeries offering them, clean landing pages for $500, whatever. At some point, every company is going to have an ice landing page and aesthetic IG grid, everything's going to look spot on. And then what happens? None of them will give us a reason to remember them because they all played it safe and now they look the same. So if you're building something right now, here's a question worth asking. What are you doing that someone in your industry might actually disagree with? What convention are you challenging? What belief are you willing to stand behind even if it turns some people away? Because the biggest risk right now might be making something nobody has a reason to talk about.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.