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Podcast

How to Activate a Killer Brand, with Natalie Cotter, Sr. Director, Digital Retail at Liquid Death Mountain Water

Standing out in a crowded beverage market takes creativity, endless energy, and, at least in one case, a passion for murder. I’m talking of course about the brand Liquid Death, which has grown from an Amazon listing in 2019 to a massive online presence as well as showing up behind 110,000 brick and mortar doors. The bond they have created between the Liquid Death brand and their "humans", as they call their consumers, is truly remarkable. Natalie Cotter, Sr. Director of Digital Retail at Liquid Death, joined the podcast to share some thirst-quenching details on how they continue to kill it in the beverage aisle.

Transcript

Peter Crosby: Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.

Natalie Cotter: Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to chat with you guys today.

Peter Crosby: God, we're thrilled. Liquid Death is such a unique brand and for those of our listeners who are under a rock or something and don't know about Liquid Death, they're a brand of canned water with an awesome twist on their messaging with the tagline, murder Your Thirst. I'm hoping that this now makes us a True Crime podcast. Those ratings are out of control but thank you so much for, it's such an awesome brand. I remember seeing it for the first time and just was compelled by it, and it was the best quench that I've had in a long time. It's really just an awesome brand.

Natalie Cotter: Yeah, it's been a really fun ride for us to continue to grow the brand over the last few years and continue to grow it into the future.

Peter Crosby: Well, Natalie's here to share Liquid Desk journey from a digitally first brand to now selling in over 110,000 doors and what other brands our listeners can learn from that journey. So tell us how you came to be a killer brand in omnichannel. See what I did there?

Natalie Cotter: Yeah. So our founder and CEO Mike, he started with a video before ever having even produced the product. And so he used that video through different social ads and digital channels to essentially generate interest amongst viewers. And then from there, there was such great adoption that the team started building the company. So like you said, Peter, we were a digital first brand getting started on Amazon in 2019, where virtually all of our brand sales occurred in the virtual world. And then from there, whole Foods was actually the first retailer to take us in brick and mortar selling our first product. So just our white can still water. And since then we've expanded the assortment, but as both shoppers and retail fell in love with our brand, it led to broader adoption in large format, digital convenience on premise and much more. And so fast forward a few years later, now we're a robust better for you beverage company with products across water, sparkling water, ice tea, and now hydration packs with our newest launch of dust last month. And we've added new flavors, disrupted stagnant categories with our fun entertainment led marketing.

Lauren Livak Gilbert: I saw the Def Dust. I'm really excited to try that and I love the Twist. And you even have a fan club too, I saw, so that you can get additional loyalty for people to sign up to be a part of the Liquid Death Club, right?

Natalie Cotter: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you can also, on our website, you can sell your soul to Liquid Death, which is a fun contractual way for you to engage with the brand. Again, very entertainment driven.

Peter Crosby: My soul is pre-sold, but if I still had it, I would definitely use it on your website. I did sell My Soul Over. I have to say I'm a huge Liquid Death fan. When I first saw the brand, I found them in Canada when I was there and I joined the website, I thought it was super cool. You get a certificate that says you signed your soul over to Liquid Death. It's just really cool the way you've branded it and how you've kind of brought it through all your channels. So big kudos to you.

Natalie Cotter: We definitely try to get creative in how we entertain with our humans and the folks that are buying our products. And oftentimes that's not even always a product first approach. That's actually how can we make our people laugh in their everyday lives? So how can they be scrolling their Instagram or TikTok accounts, see a post from us that just makes them laugh? Something that we did within that entertainment realm as well was on Spotify, we actually created a unique album called Greatest Hates where we went in and actually took some of the review feedback from our biggest haters and made a fun album out of it. So constantly looking for ways to do things differently and just ultimately make our humans laugh when they interact with our brand.

Brand Loyalty

Loyalty is very important to us, especially as we think of what are the touch points where we can first resonate with someone who would be interested in our brand. So maybe it's at a Live Nation concert or it's at a restaurant or it's in the aisle of a whole food store. How can we not only adopt them into the brand but then drive that loyalty long-term? And so what we really try to do with our brand is just one in a digital way, how can we continue to engage with them? So some of those things that we chatted about around social are super important to the brand and just engaging with them on a regular basis.

Creativity in Marketing

Yeah, we really flip it on its head and turn it into entertainment LA the Greatest Hates album, but then also to if people have negative things to say, we oftentimes just laugh it off and think through, okay, how can we make this funny? It's usually the vocal minority, but how can we kind of look at that differently? Whereas yeah, I think a lot of bigger CPG brand houses would look at that and almost shy away or try to cover it up, whereas we approach that differently than I would say the average CPG company.

Conclusion

Natalie Cotter: It's a great point, Peter and I think so many startups just in general, whether CPG or elsewhere, they want to have the business plan completely built out. You want to have the product ready, you want to have your marketing plan. It's really comfortable to know all of the pieces and how they're going to work together and have a really structured plan. The thing with that is it can slow you down. And so there's always going to be that speed to market. How can we get there? How can we test quickly? How can we adjust to what our people are saying and really just look to optimize the brand.