Easy

We’re well past the point where you can point to a Liquid Death commercial and talk about their creative genius. It’s been done plenty. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone talk about their operational excellence.

If you didn’t see it this week, the irreverent water brand did it again with a “Kegs for Pregs” campaign, launching a limited edition mini-keg of water with the help of Kylie Kelce (who is pregnant with her fourth child). Plenty are chiming in on the ad concept, but what caught my attention was how easy the brand made it to buy more water.

Their email promotion linked to a PDP, but that page wasn’t just for the keg (which sold out in 14 minutes); the regular cans were listed as variants.

If you’re the type to subscribe to Liquid Death emails—and especially the type to click through on a promotion for a keg of water (even if it’s just five liters)—there’s a pretty high likelihood you’re also the type to drink Liquid Death. Which might mean that you’re also the type who needs to reorder it.

To me, that’s the part of this campaign that stood out: Usually, when Liquid Death pulls a “stunt,” the product has its own PDP. But it’s usually not related to water. This time? The mini-keg was on the same PDP as their cans, which made grabbing more of the main product incredibly easy.

(Notably, the more broadly distributed ads linked to a landing page that featured the mini-keg in the way most of their stunts do, which speaks to how they treated returning customer traffic differently than net-new traffic from broader sources.)

As mentioned above, it’s almost tired now to talk about the creative side of Liquid Death. But that creative side has to be met with strong execution. Their CEO, Mike Cessario, has even said so himself.

In a LinkedIn post almost a year ago, Cessario wrote:

Powerful beverage marketing and brand demand means nothing without retail and distributor execution. Making the decision to invest in an amazing field sales army has been the real secret to our rapid success.

Our field sales managers are the ones hitting stores every day building displays, making sure shelves aren't sitting empty, and building relationships with store managers and distributor reps. They make sure the marketing team isn't marketing to empty shelves. Without displays, it's very hard to keep a high demand product in stock if you only have a couple square feet of space on a shelf that holds a handful of cases.

The categories here (beverage, retail) are actually meaningless; the lesson applies across the spectrum: Make a good product, market it well, and make it easy to buy.

How many extra sales did Liquid Death drive yesterday from that email, because the mini-keg was on the same PDP as the cans? How many of those sales pulled demand forward or increased purchase frequency?

The value here is hard to quantify, because Liquid Death doesn’t sell water DTC (it uses wholesale distribution), but I’d guess it’s pretty significant—especially when not making it easy could lead to purchasing a different brand on the next trip to the grocery store (entirely possible since Liquid Death has good distribution, but certainly isn’t yet *everywhere*). And it feels like a pretty significant incremental return for how little work it must have been to just add another variant to the website.

Making it easy to repeat seems like a good tradeoff to me.