How Liquid Death Built Demand Everywhere

How Liquid Death Built Demand Everywhere Speaker 2: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today, I'm incredibly excited to have a new guest on the show, Natalie Cotter. Thank you so much for joining us. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me, Destaney. Super stoked to be here. Speaker 2: Yeah. So when we originally got connected, you were working with probably one of the more disruptive brands in the space, and that was Liquid Death. But tell us a little bit about what you're doing now. Speaker 1: Yeah, Liquid Death was a really fun ride. I joined them about three years ago and worked with them through some of their most transformational years digitally. Recently left back in the spring and am now working with startup CPG brands to help them really win online. Speaker 2: That is amazing. Now, that's pretty broad. Helping CPG brands win online. That can be kind of overall encompassing. What are the biggest things? What are the keys to winning online when you consider that? Speaker 1: There's a lot of keys. I think overall just being really honest with who you are as your brand and sort of bringing that to life, whether it's in the walled gardens of the Amazons of the world or within a delivery app ecosystem, I think there's a lot of opportunities for you just to bring your brand to life in the digital world in a lot of ways that the marketplaces or your D2C website can just sort of support your brand as you grow both in-store and online. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a whole conversation to be had honestly. A lot of people still look at the Amazons, the Walmarts and kind of consider it a brand devaluation. They don't necessarily realize I think the opportunities both of those marketplaces drive and maybe the trade-off is not having access to as much as your data as you would need to see, but the traffic and I think the opportunity and potential is definitely well worth it. Speaker 1: That's a really good point, Destaney. I was actually talking to someone not too long ago about just the value of the traffic and conversion on Amazon and just the potential there. I think it brings up the conversation of D2C versus Amazon a lot and where to spend your time and resources because you could have the best converting product page in the world, but if no one's going to go to it, then that doesn't matter. It's finding that balance of How can you set your brand up for success online? And oftentimes a lot of testing and learning. One avenue that's been really popular recently in CPG is TikTok shop. So I think everyone's trying to learn that one really quickly because it's just another avenue for diversification online and how can you sort of test all of these different things and figure out what works for your brand. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Not to mention a few weeks ago, I mean, it's been a bit, Amazon's rolled out the capabilities to drive traffic from Amazon directly to a consumer's website. The first time I saw it tested, I want to say was It wasn't Prime Day, but it was maybe Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Tentpole, right? Well, a few weeks ago, I noticed that not only are they driving traffic to D2C sites directly from Amazon, but they're also allowing an AI agent to complete purchases on the site, so you don't even need to leave Amazon. You can see the website-ish, and then it's like, do you want our AI agent to check out? Which is interesting because obviously OpenAI's announcement of having a checkout experience in-app has been going viral, but Amazon's already moving on that opportunity. Will they be able to sell the story and get brands to adopt? I don't know. There's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to, again, losing access to customer data. But the future is exciting. Speaker 1: It really is. And I think It's going to look totally different. I think we're going to wake up one day five years from now and say, oh my God, what happened? It's interesting too when you think about Amazon, one of their core foundations when they started decades ago now was they wanted to be the everything store. Now as they get bigger and it's interesting as you go into these annual vendor negotiations and they're clearly focused on profit now, how can they sort of set up these customer experiences to still be the everything store but it not hit their bottom line? Speaker 2: Absolutely. And you just think about what do customers want? There's a reason Walmart stock their shelves a very specific fashion and the digital shelf is not that much different. It's the key players in the space, what's going to convert the best and who's going to drive the most traffic. It really boils down to that. You give your spiel about how do you be successful online. In my opinion, it really comes down to those two levers. I think a lot of people struggle to understand what's the best thing to work on first when there's 700 different variables. It's like, how is your traffic and how are you converting? And then you can kind of take baby steps once you know those two things. Speaker 1: Right, right. And it's so important to start with a good foundation too because if you have crappy images on your product pages, again back to the conversion conversation, you can't even think about running ads or driving. Meaningful off-site traffic until you have a good experience online. And so some of those like foundational elements that especially on Amazon, you have to have in place to get in the flywheel. Otherwise, you're pushing the boulder uphill. Speaker 2: It's a fun probably role for you to be in coming from the Liquid Death experience and now advising brands. I feel similarly in that we've been in the space for so long that the basics just come natural to us. I'm a conversion and traffic, but brands who are not familiar with online or who are not native to the e-commerce experience don't understand that. So I think sometimes like I love getting hyped up about like the TikTok shops, the AI enablement, the AMC things. I always need to take a step back and be like, no, actually we got to check on that foundation. That's the place you're in. You're going from probably one of the most well-known brands, more disruptive brands in the world right now. Probably had very different problems than the brands that you are now educating. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's really interesting how understanding Amazon is just such a great skill set to have and I think a lot of people really value right now in our current day and age. You know, with Liquid Death and other clients that I've worked with, it is interesting how sometimes they nail marketing so well or they nailed, you know, a brick and mortar experience, you know, um, whether it's like, you know, they got an Albertsons early or they got in 7-Eleven early and they had this really great success, which is awesome, but they never had the digital experience or the marketplaces thing nailed down. And so coming in and sort of helping a business at that critical moment has been, Really, really interesting and I actually have one client too that is an international client and they've been wildly successful in the CPG space. And now coming to the States, they're like, this is a whole different ballgame. How do we really come together on Amazon, especially knowing Amazon US is the biggest Amazon in the world? Speaker 2: Yeah. You bring up a good point of brands sometimes tend to think in silos. And I actually got into a healthy debate with someone on LinkedIn this week about that exact topic. They had made this statement that If you take a talented in-house team and put them up against a talented agency, the in-house team wins every single day. And I was like, you know, it's a bold statement. I've seen a lot of incredible in-house teams, but I wouldn't say every single day. And I think the reason being is one thing that we see is brands do typically nail something incredibly well and it's what made them successful. But that leads to bias in other areas of the business. Like Liquid Death, I can only imagine the Amazon advertising struggles you all would have when it came to branded search versus non-branded acquisitions and what that looked like because of that initial success. And I think you also came from SaaS side prior to working brand side, so you have good visibility to both. Agency side does bring a lot of category knowledge, and I think that's really important to have to your point of really how do you lean into what made a brand successful, but also show them the other areas or avenues that they're going to need to get right to expand into e-commerce. Speaker 1: Absolutely, and I think it's important, you know, when you're working with multiple clients, that adds so much value to every client that you work with. You know, just working across different categories, you learn, oh, hey, I tried this new thing over here with this client. Let's go apply that over here when it makes sense in a similar category. And I think that's the huge value and unlock on the agency or consulting side is just in general, you know, you're not stuck in Hey, you know, I've been in this role for a year plus. We've always done it this way. It's hard to challenge things. It's just easier to get into that status quo and then when you can kind of be knowledge sharing between what's happening amongst The peer set, I think that's wildly valuable too. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the Liquid Death success because everyone knows how successful they are off-platform. I think everyone has seen the commercials go viral and all of the fun partnerships and I take the Mary Ruth sleeping at least once a week. I don't know if people realize how well they translated that success to also Amazon success. I believe a lot of their recent sparkling or the tea launches hit number five or top in beverages really, really quickly. How do you feel like you were able to capitalize on the momentum and the marketing they're good at off-platform to on-platform success? Did it translate incredibly well or were there things that you had to really work on to make sure that success also worked on Amazon? Speaker 1: That's a really great question, Destaney. Our Ice Tea launch was one of my first launches shortly after joining the company. Which was a really fun one. You know, we loaded in a Born to Run. We were ready to go. And then within 48 hours of launch, we actually sold out of all of this inventory that we thought would be a bad problem to have. We thought it was going to last us six weeks and it was actually crazy. I remember in the few hours before we officially sold out, Amazon started throttling our product page and you couldn't find it. But we had such a loyal fan base that we were sending emails and texts and People were driving to Amazon and still buying it even though you physically couldn't find it from search. I think the value of our loyal fan base, early days, we were a direct-to-consumer brand before we were on Amazon. In those early innings, we were able to capture a lot of that first-party data. Our loyalists were true loyalists. Another thing that we did to build that base was we had the Liquid Death Country Club experience. You'd go to a Live Nation concert or an in-person experience and you could go to the Liquid Death Country Club and you could sell your soul to be a part of the country club. What we were doing there is we were growing that loyal fan base. Whenever we had a new item launch on Amazon or Prime Day or we were trying to drive traffic, It was just such a great place to go tell people and then they post it on social media and then we pair that with some influencers and a fun in-house production video that we would do. So I think it was more so knowing that Amazon You're working within the Amazon box, but how can you kind of do it differently and still staying true to who you are? Another fun thing that we did was in the Q&A section on the product pages, we would like plant certain questions in there and then answer them within our marketing voice to talk about the flavor of the product or make it fun. Yeah, yeah, and we made it really fun and we did something similar to our direct-to-consumer website, but I think it's just staying true to who you are as a brand and knowing how to activate it within the confines of the marketplaces. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Two really key points there to reiterate on is The thing that the Liquid Deaths and the Dude Wipes and the Elf Cosmetics do so well is they know that audience. And something I see frequently, Amazon brands make the same mistake over and over as they try to target everyone and effectively convert no one. They take the opportunity that Amazon's providing them with and they get too big for their britches and they create a listing that is just diluted and good for everyone, but actually not driving that authenticity. I think something Liquid Death's obviously leaned into incredibly well from the very beginning. I think one of the first viral campaigns was taking all of the negative feedback and putting it into an ad and it attracted the right customers. Really, really hit on for any brands listening in is figure out what the ideal audience is and build that evangelism. The second thing I would say you all did really well is you played, again, I think you said played within the confines of the retailer and that was what you all did with Amazon. You viewed it as what it is, a bottom-of-the-funnel way to capture demand. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And a lot of brands want to go to Amazon and create demand but then they don't make the right investment or they don't utilize anything up or funnel or they don't do anything off-platform and that's such a big miss. You mentioned that when you couldn't find your listing within search, customers still went out of their way to find it, which is... A really OG strategy, anyone who's been playing in this space for 10 years, search, find, buy, used to be a strategy where you can manipulate how people interacted with the search results to improve your conversion rate. It's not within TOS. Everyone listening, Amazon, if you're listening, I am not recommending that, but that's inherently what happened here in a very natural fashion. You had so much evangelism. You created the demand-off platform. And Amazon was just the avenue for customers to convert a little bit easier than maybe a D2C site, which is really, really powerful. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think there's also just this On Amazon, there's only so many people going to Amazon to start their search or to start their shopping journey. I think social media has really started to prime people around how can you meet customers where they already are. We were able to do that through text and email very effectively through some of our marketing campaigns, but there's also this thought and I think why TikTok shop is really taking off is You're not waiting for them to come to you. You're going to them. As we think about the evolution of programmatic advertising and the various audience targeting, I think it's going to just fundamentally change how retail works. There are so many ads running around in front of our faces every day. How do you stand out and how do you meet someone at the right point in their shopping journey? Speaker 2: Not to mention, AI is providing contextual insights to people that are asking questions. I think we're going to see this shift in the industry. The last five years have been about performance marketing. We have all of the access to data and all the customer touchpoints possible. AMC is just 10x that. I think AI utilizing all of the context that you have is meaning that you can no longer pay to be put in front of a customer or inherently how we used to be, right? AI is going to put some filters in place before providing a recommendation. So what we're going to see is everyone kind of leaning or transitioning back into brand marketing. That billboard ad, that TV ad, putting your product in front of a customer before they're ready to convert is going to be so important. Because right now, if I go to AI and ask it, what shoes do I need? It's going to recommend a Nike shoe to me. It knows my searches. It knows my benefits. But if I'm sitting on the couch and I see an Asics commercial on the TV, I may go to AI and say, show me Asics recommendations. I think the way that brands are going to have to shift, which means the Liquid Deaths, the Red Bulls, the Dude Wives are in a really good place. They have a major competitive advantage in my opinion, which is why we're seeing these disruptor brands make up so much share. That is what they're doing well. Speaker 1: I think what's interesting, too, is the cost of advertising is getting so expensive now. Some of my clients, you look at the CPCs and it's like $10 for some basic terms. I know in sometimes the supplement categories, you're getting up like $20, $30 CPCs. It's wild. I think as that gets more expensive, too, Liquid Death has done a really great job at how do we stand out. You know, even though maybe we don't always want to hash out a budget for it. And they always did a really great job at, you know, you're scrolling TikTok and you stop and you watch their video because it's so crazy and entertainment driven. Speaker 2: What the hell is this? Speaker 1: So I also wonder if just to garner the attention of their customers, are brands going to start doing even crazier things? Like you were saying, this switch back to brand marketing over performance marketing. Performance marketing is also just getting so expensive. How can brands make their dollar go further when they need it most? Speaker 2: In a way, that's authentic as well. I think that's going to be pretty key. You see the brands that try to lean into the disruptive marketing. Have you seen the PineSol ad that's recently going viral? Speaker 1: Oh, I haven't. Speaker 2: I don't even know how to explain it, but if anyone's listening, it's definitely 4Gen-Z made 4Gen-Z, which is funny. Pine Sol is inherently typically, I would say, a more Gen X style of product used to clean homes. There's pros and cons to it, and everyone's kind of wondering if it's actually authentic to their brand voice. I don't think it is, but it is doing what it sought out to do. It's very similar to the Duolingo Instagram account, right? But there's a level of, is it disruptive and still authentic? Because I think what we're seeing, this younger generation craves authenticity. We're seeing it more with AI. I think that's the reason why a lot of Founder-led companies are successful because they connect in a very authentic way and I think that's going to be really, really powerful. As more people do these crazy chaotic stunts, you know, the Paul Brothers, things like that, people are going to make sure that it has to fit with your brand voice. Don't just go post something crazy for the sake of views. Make sure it's authentic and you're doing it in the right way. Speaker 1: You know what's so interesting, and this might be a hot take, but I feel like there's been influencers in the last couple of years who have come out with beverage or CPG or beauty brands. It's been fascinating in the beverage space, too, because the alcoholic seltzers had a moment. I think Sunny D even did one of them. It was a hot moment. Everyone was trying to jump on that bandwagon. But you look at some of these influencer-led brands who aren't staying true to themselves, you know, and since I know one of the founders was sober and she launched a... Speaker 2: Unwell. Speaker 1: It was a different one, but I think that authenticity is super important too for influencer-led brands, which I think we're seeing some deviation there where influencers are trying to grab revenue versus saying authentic to themselves and social media just Like, slashes them for it. Absolutely. Speaker 2: And that's only going to get worse. I think, I mean, even the smallest thing. I've stopped posting near as much content that's just blog format or written content because everyone else is posting the same content with AI. I've been leaning into a lot more video content and audio content because I'm like, it's more authentic, I feel like, and I'm tired of seeing all of the AI posts. You can tell when someone is just hopping on the opportunity for the sake of hopping on an opportunity and releasing a brand versus someone who's truly passionate about it. And I think that's a fantastic call out that also just, I mean, reiterates everything else we've said on this episode. Yeah. I had a quick question. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: You mentioned TikTok. And I don't play in that space because I've been uncertain about making the investment with everything going on from a, is TikTok going to be banned perspective. What are your overall thoughts on that? If you're a brand right now, do you recommend you go ahead and set up and run with it or is it too risky? Speaker 1: I think if you have the infrastructure for it, it never hurts. They have a direct plug-in with Shopify, so if you're already a Shopify D2C website and you're selling there, You know, it doesn't hurt to try. I will say the dollars to get going can be a bit daunting because you can't just set it and forget it like on Amazon and go to all your friends and family and they go subscribe and save. Like it doesn't work like that on TikTok. But you know, I actually work with a couple of brands and alongside other folks that run their TikTok shop businesses that their TikTok shop businesses are sometimes bigger than their Amazon business. It's wild. But what I also think is interesting is there's kind of this evolution right now, especially because I work with a lot of Early stage brands, you know, sometimes pre-revenue or sort of series A-ish stage. And TikTok shop is so I think like desperate to take off and do well that they're offering all of these subsidies. So they're funding discounts, they're covering shipping to the final consumer. And when you think of a category like beverage, when it can cost 10 bucks a case to ship that case to your final customer, it's expensive and it's hard to get to profitability sometimes in the marketplaces. But it's fascinating when TikTok kind of runs some of these subsidies and then these brands are able just to take off. Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 1: And so I think it's a very interesting time. I just wonder how sustainable it is for TikTok to continue to fund that ecosystem. And then, yeah, who knows if TikTok's even going to be a thing a few months from now. Speaker 2: We'll see. That's a fantastic point. I mean, at the end of the day, you have to lean into your competitive advantage. And you mentioned, you know, Amazon started as the everything store because that was their competitive advantage over a retail store that only had limited shelf space. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: What have we seen in the past seven years? Amazon no longer needs to be the everything store, which is why all the Me Too products and the knockoffs are not doing well. Those brands are the first ones to complain about rising costs and rising CPCs, but at the end of the day, Amazon's intentionally pushing out brands. Okay, don't quote me on that. And again, if Amazon's listening, that's not exactly what I meant. You can see the transition, the maturity of the platform. So I think that's a fantastic call. It's a good time to get into TikTok. TikTok's advantage is, in my opinion, subsidizing a lot of those costs in order to drive adoption, but it's not going to last. So get in while you can and expect maturity in the platform and also maybe platform changes if a new app gets launched in the U.S. Speaker 1: Absolutely, absolutely. Speaker 2: We've covered a lot, I would say, of the basics. Actually, we went both. We did the basics and the foundation, but I think got a little bit in the weeds here. Is there anything else that you think that we're missing and that you would really like to get across to brands who are trying to be successful? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, you know, what's interesting is a, um, I've worked with a lot of different brands now and a brand can only be successful as their whole team is ready to get on board. You know, and that was one of the things that like with Duck, that was always so cool to me as our CEO is a creative guy and he just had this vision for what the company could be. And, um, you know, I, I've done speaking engagements at other conferences and things like that. You get sort of the big CPG brand houses of the world in conversation and you realize like, oh, because it's not top-down for you guys, it's so hard for you to do things differently or for you to get a risque concept approved. So what I've learned is that, you know, working with a ton of different brands, both big and small, is that You have to understand how your organization works and how you can get buy-in from the various stakeholders because Amazon and marketplaces and just digital in general can only be as successful as the team willing to get behind you. Whether it's even operations, whether you're shipping inventory into FBA or you're drop shipping it yourself, there are so many things that go into the success of Amazon and it's not just marketing, which I think a lot of people What people perceive wrong about Amazon is they just think it's a marketing channel, but there's so much more behind the scenes, the unsexy pieces of our day-to-day that people don't always see. Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more. A lot of people see it as kind of a secondary, like, okay, just figure it out and run. I mean, there's a reason why almost every single e-commerce lead is one of the youngest in the organization. It's like, just go figure it out. And it can sometimes be an afterthought. And we see a lot of transitioning talent in this space because of that, because you get really good at your piece of the business, but the only thing that's preventing you from excelling is your leadership team. They don't necessarily understand the platform, so they shut it down. And I think that's why it's so important to be in our position where it is really education first. It's educating in order to get the buy-in and the one that that trust is built. You see the results. It's so much easier to invest in a platform. Speaker 1: Yeah. I think also, too, just like the innate curiosity of the people that run businesses online is so fun. It is. I think it's challenging the norm and like we were saying, as we just, you know, the AI starts to come into play and the new platforms and social commerce, however that evolves, you know, it's going to be us curious people who are going to constantly be pushing the envelope, trying things a new way, which is so exciting. I love being on sort of the cutting edge of all of that. Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more I think we're seeing a generational shift I think you know. The Gen Zers are used to a rapid pace and things changing quickly. I think that's what social is driven for them. People in e-commerce are already working in that environment and it's driving innovation. You mentioned the curiosity and the creative thinkers. It's really the visionaries, I think, are going to lead this next way. But it's cool because you can only be a successful visionary with an integrator. I say that as an 86% visionary. If I did not have my COO, Alex, None of this would be possible, but AI is providing a level of integration that maybe people didn't have before. So I think you have all these people walking around with big ideas and they're going to be able to use AI to make those ideas accessible. And that's a fun like we're in a renaissance era. It's going to be a really cool time. Speaker 1: We are. We are. And you know what's funny, Destaney? I remember sitting in my high school graduation, our commencement speaker made a comment around, I think it was something like, 70% of you are going to hold jobs one day that don't exist today. And I was like, What does that even mean? There's a lot of doctors and lawyers and things, and I know you have an education background, Destaney, and I was actually a biochemist. It's funny to just think about how this career path in this industry has just evolved, and I think 20 years from now, it's also going to look very different. Speaker 2: And we know that. Like the older generation, I mean, I'll talk to my family. It was risky. They didn't want me getting into this space. They are the people that will stay in a job for 20 years. And our generation, I think we're accepting. Hey, you know, we may not be around in 10 years, but let's make the most of it while we can and lean in because we can't fight it. Well, I think that's a fantastic point to end on. Absolutely loved having this conversation. For everyone listening, what's the best way to reach out to you? If they're interested in your services or having a conversation, where should they find you? Speaker 1: Yeah, come find me on LinkedIn, Natalie Cotter. I always love just talking to people and seeing what they're building. So yeah, reach out. I'd love to chat. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for the conversation and best of luck with all the brands you're managing. Speaker 1: Thank you and thanks for having me on, Destaney. We'll have to do this again soon. I love chatting. Speaker 2: Yes.