It’s impossible to ignore Liquid Death. Over the past 12 months, the canned water brand has been everywhere. LinkedIn is peppered with daily posts from branding bros. Omnipresent references appear in almost every marketing deck. Oceans of the stuff were on display on every table at Cannes. And there is a constant stream of coverage for the brand and its tattooed ex-agency founder Mike Cessario.

Make no mistake, Cessario deserves a shit ton of credit. Anyone who can grow a brand as fast and as successfully as this is worthy. And Liquid Death is a fine, minor brand with some potential. But by early 2024 it became apparent that the global marketing community was, once again, getting things completely out of proportion.

For starters, there is the minuscule size of the brand. Last year Liquid Death did $263m in revenue. Again, nothing to be sneezed at. But given Coke does that every 72 hours, maybe marketers need to tone it down a bit. And Coke is making billions in profit from these revenues. Liquid Death is “aiming” to earn its first profit in 2024.

Remember a decade ago when marketers lost their collective shit over Dollar Shave Club because it had a cool organic ad, a great back story and an entirely specious growth narrative? LinkedIn was filled with morons claiming that the direct-to-consumer brand was now bigger than Gillette, despite the established P&G brand being a bazillion times bigger and more profitable than its cool new rival.

And it’s happening all over again.

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The perfect pin-up

There are plenty of new brands doing two hundred million bucks of revenues. So why is Liquid Death suddenly the go-to go-to-market cliché for marketers? It’s partly because the brand’s disruptive approach floats the digital boat of every performance marketer. But it’s also because Liquid Death ticks another important box: it’s a brand built from packaging and promotion, and little else.

Sure, its water comes from the Alps. And there are those lovely aluminium cans. But no one talks about Liquid Death’s product. And that’s entirely the reason why the brand has become so prevalent across PowerPoint decks. It’s all about the ads. The attitude. The social. The events. And nothing else. That makes Liquid Death the perfect pin-up brand for a generation of marketers who define marketing as advertising and who spend their careers ignoring the remaining 90% of our discipline’s hinterland.

Every week a marketer somewhere posts the same inane message that says something along the lines of: “It’s not the best product that wins, it’s the best-marketed product.” There is so much wrong with this statement it almost defies belief. But let’s start with the fact that it is rarely true. In almost every case, the quality of the product and its ability to deliver is imperative for success.

And then there is the troubling fact that product should – at least in theory – be part of marketing’s remit. Setting up a statement in which marketing is seen as being more important than the product literally makes no sense. It’s like arguing that midfielders are more important than Manchester United. The two are indivisible. One is part of the other.

No one talks about Liquid Death’s product. And that’s entirely the reason why the brand has become so prevalent across PowerPoint decks. It’s all about the ads.

Of course, what these marketers are really trying to say is that marketing – at least their kind of marketing, which consists exclusively of communications – is so important it outweighs all the other factors that they aren’t involved in. And yet if you step back and look at the original ‘four Ps’, it is almost impossible not to acknowledge that while the promotional P has its place, the product P is invariably the most important tactical consideration. Shitty marketing can surely kill a great product, but without a successful, product even the best marketing does little other than speed its own demise.

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The importance of product

I know we aren’t supposed to quote Elon Musk anymore because he likes Trump and he’s evil and stuff. But Musk, ironically given his own Tesla travails, is bang on the money on this topic, more so than any other.

“Generally, my advice is to spend less time on finance, less time in conference rooms, less time on PowerPoint and more time just making your product as amazing as possible,” he told an interviewer from the Wall Street Journal back in 2020. “I don’t think it has to be breakthrough innovation, just make your product better. This is the thing that really matters. Sometimes we try to think ‘we don’t love this product, but we think others will love it’. That’s not how it works. If you don’t love it, others won’t love it either.”

Too often when I talk to marketers about this stuff, they quickly point out that their team is not involved in new product development. Sad but true. Most marketing teams no longer work on any form of product implementation. Like price, it has become the province of organisational others who enjoy more of your company’s confidence.

The role of ‘product marketing’ makes little sense until you appreciate just how divorced most marketers have become from the things that they are meant to be marketing. We had to invent that title to signal that this employee is unusual because, unlike every other marketer you ever met, this one actually does stuff with the product. Similarly, the tech obsession with ‘product-market fit’ initially appears to be a superfluous conceit. Why would you ever have a product that does not attempt a fit with its market’s needs? Again, it’s a concept we had to create because most marketers cannot join the market they serve with the product that they sell because they have no influence over the latter.

‘Existing product improvement’

But Musk’s point is that product work does not need to be breakthrough or the kind associated with building new stuff. I can count on one hand the number of consulting projects I got to work on that started with a blank page to create a new product from scratch. Usually, there is a team in Switzerland doing that, and we marketers wait at the bottom of the organisational banana slide for it to arrive.

The good news is that, once that happens and it hits the market, the Swiss team lose all interest and go off to innovate something else. It’s then – with the product in market and data from consumers spewing out of every touchpoint – that marketing teams can and should get involved. It’s not new product development; call it ‘existing product improvement’. But this more gradual, ongoing product work is probably more important. The good news is that free user data is now very easy to access, the bad news is your organisation’s appetite for product change has dwindled to inertia.

Perhaps it’s time to introduce a six-month embargo on marketing references to Liquid Death. It’s a lovely little product but entirely more famous among marketers than the market it targets. And, quite frankly, I suspect it will not grow into a behemoth but rather usher in an era in which canned water – free from microplastics and branded a bazillion different ways – will take a giant slice of the drinks market. By then, of course, marketers will have found some other non-product-based marketing exemplar to justify their partial, superficial approach to marketing.

We are a fickle discipline. But we are consistent in our fickleness.

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor and PPA Columnist of the Year, and founder of the Mini MBA in Marketing, on which he spends inordinate amounts of time practising existing product improvement.