Mike Cessario, chief executive of drinks brand Liquid Death, has been hailed as a “marketing genius”. The former ad man co-founded the company in 2017 in an attempt to win over consumers in the highly competitive bottled-water market, through a combination of viral campaigns and a no-plastics platform.
It seems to be working. Since its launch, Liquid Death has grabbed headlines with PR stunts, amassed a social following in the millions and achieved a $1.4bn (£1.1bn) valuation. Here, Cessario discusses why he’s building his company on the foundations of branding and comedy.
Did you always want to be a CEO?
No! In high school I never knew what I was going to do, or even what I wanted to go to college for. I was really into music, I played in bands. I was also always really good at drawing so I was the guy in the band that was screen-printing T shirts and making the show flyers and all of that.
That was, unknowingly, the seed of the ‘do-it-yourself’ entrepreneurial thing. Then, as a senior in high school, I realised that graphic design was a real subject you could study at college, so that’s the path I took, which led me to advertising.
Starting a company came out of necessity. I worked for advertising agencies and there were clients that just did not want to make interesting work. We knew that we could do it but, especially at really big companies, everybody’s just trying to protect their jobs and not take any risks. Eventually I realised that the only way to make the great marketing that I think brands should make in the modern day was to create my own brand and do it myself. So that was the path to CEO and founder.
What do you think makes a good leader?
There are all different kinds of leaders. It sounds clichéd, but authenticity is important. People can see through when you’re trying to fake something or put something on. You have to be who you are. If you’re an authoritative, assertive person you need to own that and people will respect it. Or if you’re very quiet, more introverted, intellectual, you can own that and people will respect that.
People need to believe what you say and believe that you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do. That’s really important. For me, it’s also important that people know you have their best interests at heart. At the end of the day, when it comes to my organisation, I work for them as much as they work for me.
What are you looking for when you hire a leadership team?
As a company and as a leadership team, we definitely skew more to the intellectual approach than a ‘brute force’ approach. We like to think through everything and be as smart as we possibly can be. So I’m definitely looking for the smartest people out there.
But Liquid Death is not a typical brand and it’s not going to be the right brand for everybody, even if you are smart. That’s sort of the bullseye that we’re always looking for: someone who’s incredibly smart and experienced, but then has a little bit of weirdness to them, so they really get the brand and identify with what we’re trying to do.
What is the best bit of business advice you’ve ever been given?
If you’re going to start your own company, it’s got to be in a field where the main thing required to win is something you know better than most other people.
That’s why Liquid Death made sense for me. In the beverage world, we sit in these huge categories with lots of other brands. The functional differences between products are almost non-existent. So the way you’re going to win is through brand – and brand is what I know how to do better than most other people.
That has positioned us to have the success we’ve had. Creativity is at the heart of brand-building. And a brand can only be as creative as the top decision-maker. If the CEO is not a very creative person, they can hire all the creative people they want, but if they’re ultimately saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the ideas and they don’t get it, it’s never going to work. There are not a tonne of CEOs out there that came from the creative side. That helps us infuse this creative problem-solving into every aspect of the company. It’s a company that’s built on brand and I think that has been a critical part of our success.
What is the biggest business challenge that you’re facing right now?
In the US, the number-one struggle for almost every high-growth beverage company is distribution. You have to sell to a distributor. That distributor then sells to retailers. And, in the US, every distributor that you signed with has exclusive rights to distribute your product in their region. Once you do a deal with a distributor in Florida no other distributor is allowed to sell your product to those retailers. You have to really hope that the distributor does a good job because you don’t have any other options.
Retailers don’t hold back stock anymore because they’re too limited on space. If your product sells out and leaves the shelf empty, they can’t put more in. And distributors can only visit stores a certain number of times per week with a restock.
What is the biggest driver of change in your business?
The fact that we’re a high-growth brand. High growth means constant change. We started selling our first product, on Amazon only, in February 2019. We didn’t even launch in our first physical retailer until the spring of 2020, so it’s really only been a couple of years that we’ve been stocked by a lot of retailers. Our growth the first couple of years has been 200% or 300%, so it’s almost a different company every six to 12 months.
Retailers originally would not put Liquid Death on the shelves but now we’re in every major store in the US. They love us now. So much of the early phase of Liquid Death was just trying to convince people to take a chance on us. Now that we’re everywhere, there’s a different focus.
What’s been your proudest achievement in your current role?
That we’ve successfully built a brand that is all about making people laugh and is designed to be healthy and better for you at the same time. In previous decades, nine times out of 10, if a brand is really making you laugh, they’re selling you alcohol, candy or junk food.
Right now we’re the third most-followed beverage brand on social media, if you look at Instagram and Tiktok. The only two brands above us are Monster and Red Bull. And, based on growth rates, our team says we will pass Monster around March next year to become number two. Of the most followed top-20 beverage brands on social media, none of them is healthy except Liquid Death. My proudest accomplishment is that we successfully broke in with a product that is better for you.
What book do you think every business leader should read at least once?
One that was helpful to me early on was The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz. Hearing from somebody that was young and building something huge was really helpful. And, thinking about the difference between wartime CEOs and peacetime CEOs and the realities of what you’re going to have to deal with as a high-growth startup founder, that really stuck out for me.
And the other one was Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands by Doug Holt. Each chapter is a case study of a particular brand that had outsized success in a category where there wasn’t a lot of differentiation between the players. It focuses on how these successful brands leverage what is happening in culture to rise above the others. That’s something most non-marketing business folks don’t always appreciate.
What is one piece of advice you would give to your successor?
Make sure everybody’s laughing. If people stop laughing, you’re probably going to lose. So keep people laughing. Luckily, laughter and comedy is endless because, at its roots, comedy is making fun of what’s happening in culture at the moment. There will always be a way to make people laugh.
