Liquid Death Got Ridiculously Successful by Asking One Question: 'What's the Dumbest Idea You Can Think of Right Now?' Want to stand out in a crowded market? The founder of ridiculous canned-water brand Liquid Death has a suggestion: Embrace dumb ideas.
By Margot Boyer-Dry Edited by Frances Dodds
This story appears in the December 2021 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
Water is the basis of life: It grows plants, it constitutes up to 60 percent of the adult human body, and we can't go longer than about three days without drinking it. So Liquid Death is probably the last thing you'd think to name a water brand.
That's exactly why former marketing creative director Mike Cessario founded the canned-water company Liquid Death in 2017. He abides by a habit of asking, "What's the dumbest idea you can think of right now?" That practice sparked an idea for packaging water differently than anyone else: in a can with a skull on it, emblazoned with the punk slogan "Murder your thirst." Cessario's contrarian branding has earned flustered press, a deep degree of street cred, and a lot of social followers — more than half a million on Instagram and nearing a million on TikTok. It has also led the company to become a top-selling water at Whole Foods and Walmart in just a few short years.
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Liquid Death may be an extreme example of nonconformity, but in Cessario's view, any company can take advantage of the "dumbest idea" principle. Here's how.
Think wrong. Cessario attributes the genesis of dumb-idea thinking to John Bielenberg, coauthor of Think Wrong, a book that discusses how the brain is programmed to replicate success. "By design, your brain is wired to not create new, innovative things but to repeat things that are already out there," says Cessario. "You almost have to trick your brain into innovation by trying to think of a bad idea." Of course, innovative ideas aren't always actionable, but aiming for the dumbest one possible will steer your thinking to a more innovative place.
Even when you land on an idea that feels like it's worth pursuing, it can be difficult to get others on board in the early days, as Cessario learned when he first shared the concept of Liquid Death.
"You know this is only going to appeal to like 20 heavy metal guys and nobody else," he recalls hearing. The press echoed that inflamed reaction: An Eater headline called the company "uncomfortably aggressive."
"Truly innovative ideas have to be almost laughable at first," says Cessario. It's the market, not onlookers, that determines success. In its first month online, Cessario says, Liquid Death sold $100,000 of water, spending only $2,500 on marketing.
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Start small. A number of Liquid Death's "dumb ideas" have become smash-hit marketing campaigns — including online videos and heavy-metal-style swag. But the company doesn't start by swinging big. "We try to make what we call small bets," testing low-cost ideas and monitoring the response, says Cessario. "Sometimes the thing you think will crush doesn't and another thing rises to the top."
That includes the time the company released two albums on Spotify with lyrics from hate comments the brand gets — an initiative born from a tiny experiment.
"We were hard-pressed for a social post one day," says Cessario. "We kept getting these ridiculous hater comments on our ads, so that was top of mind." He screen-grabbed a particularly vitriolic comment and pasted it next to an image of a can with the caption "People love us on the internet." It slayed.
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That campaign cost nothing, but it showed that leaning into the brand's haters actually galvanized its fan base. Bang: a scalable marketing principle. Cessario drew up a brief on that concept, which spawned the album Greatest Hates (and a sequel), with lyrics straight from social, reviews, and anywhere else it may have gotten hate online. With songs like "Fire Your Marketing Guy," these albums have racked up a total of 260,000 listens.
"Anytime you can surprise the shit out of people, and do the thing they never expected you to do, you're in a way better place in terms of shareability," says Cessario. "You're standing out, not getting skipped."
