The Liquid Death Scandal - Daily Laterals #2

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Welcome to Day 2 of Daily Laterals - a new short email I’ll be sending every day with one piece of information or topic that stood out to me.

A reminder that the invite for Perplexity’s Comet AI browser still works, so claim it while you can. It includes a free 1 month Pro membership.

The browser is truly spectacular, I’ve been using it as a replacement to Chrome for the past month or so and it’s really improved my output.

Liquid Death’s an outlier.

Liquid Death is the canned water marketing experiment that somehow became a product. 

They are one of the most interesting companies out there from a branding and distribution perspective, considering they launched a product with almost 0 competitive edge, managed to score a deal with LiveNation for distribution and reach a $1.4bn valuation despite not being profitable.

Which wouldn’t be news for an AI SaaS product, but for a CPG product, it’s pretty insane.

I love most of their marketing work and can’t help but admire what they’ve built on creativity alone.

The slam.

Last week, Liquid Death got slammed on X by influencer Tim Pool because Liquid Death cans contain a small amount of plastic despite being advertised as plastic-free.

You’d think this is basically a technicality, but the conversation devolved into name-calling and $1 million bets (like everything does on X/Twitter).

I won’t go into it, you can read one of the original threads here.

Warning, it’s a pretty big rabbit hole and it might ruin your day.

The catch.

The catch is the initial problem wasn’t even that big. Having a minuscule amount of plastic in your cans is a technicality and they were donating hundreds of thousands

But because this involved into a shit throwing contest, LD’s founder also got pissed and started ranting.

On one of his rants, he unfortunately admitted that their claim that they donate “10% of profits” to reduce plastic waste isn’t important because… they aren’t profitable.

Which is technically correct, but in the public eye, that’s like shooting yourself in the leg.

It’s a smart move as long as no one catches on to it. I wouldn’t try and act all high and mighty knowing I pulled off that marketing stunt, especially when you built your company on pure branding affinity.

Looking back, a scandal like this was bound to happen.

A brand that operates on the concept that “attention is everything” will do everything (and anything) for attention. At some point, that’s going to blow up in their face.

The way this could have been avoided is if they issued a simple statement and moved on. But that would have been out of character.

The question is if this is the key moment that will define Liquid Death’s future or if they can bounce back from it.

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