Liquid Death is a canned water company with a fantastic name, an ingenious marketing campaign, and a product that is so much better for the environment than the plastic alternative.
Aluminum cans are recycled at a rate more than twice that of plastic, and aluminum doesn’t produce microplastics or other potentially adverse health concerns.
The brand is also brash, which I love.
Liquid Death recently partnered with Kylie Kelce to produce a “Kegs for Pregs” campaign, offering women the opportunity to enjoy a keg while pregnant.
It’s water, but it’s in a keg!
Clever.
The video is amusing. The campaign is memorable. The idea is smart.
After seeing the ad, a woman tweeted at Liquid Death, complaining that she found the name of the product “just horrible,” and seeing the image of a pregnant woman drinking the product, “even more horrible. She also reminded the company that words have energy.
Liquid Death’s response:
They produce an ad featuring the tweet, with the person’s name blurred to protect her identity, alongside a very pregnant Kylie Kelce drinking from a keg of Liquid Death and toasting her critic.
Instead of ignoring, running away, or hiding from the criticism, Liquid Death used it as fodder for an ad that went viral.
Brash, smart, and confident. Everything people want in their brands.
They owned their critic, thus turning her criticism into profit.
This is similar to the strategy used by Jimmy Kimmel in his “Mean Tweets” segment, in which celebrities read the terrible things said about them on Twitter while on camera. Kimmel knows that highlighting the cruelty and ignorance of internet trolls makes for great comedy.
The celebrities apparently know this, too, since they willingly participate in the fun, thus making these trolls look small, foolish, and sad.
Transform some of the most vile comments made about you online into comedy gold, and you win.
This is similar to how Taylor Swift used criticism of her love life as inspiration for one of her best-known songs, “Shake It Off.”
Swift steals her critics’ power by using their very words to write and record a joyful anthem that spent four weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and another eight weeks at #2.
“Shake It Off” was one of the best-selling singles of the decade in the United States, selling 5.4 million digital copies and being certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The single remains Swift’s biggest hit on the Hot 100, where it spent nearly six months in the top 10 and another 50 weeks in the top 100.
Not bad for a song that opens with her critics’ mean-spirited words.
Swift used this same strategy in her song “Mean,” which my daughter told me “got me through eighth grade.” It’s another song that highlights all of the mean things said about her online and in the media. It didn’t perform as well as “Shake It Off” (maybe because it was a country song), but it reached #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart and #2 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, selling more than 2 million digital copies.
Once again, Swift used her critics’ words to make a zillion dollars.
A beautiful combination.
The television show “Hacks” illustrates this concept in the eighth episode of its fourth season, when the mayor of Las Vegas is persuaded to appear on Deborah Vance’s late-night talk show to discuss her recent sex scandal. Rather than hiding away and allowing other late-night hosts to make fun of her, she appears on Deborah’s show, owning her mistake, making fun of herself for it, and winning over the crowd by embracing her stupidity rather than hiding from it.
This is fiction, of course, but the principle is still valid. Steal your critics’ power by embracing, owning, and transforming their criticism into something that benefits you.
I learned this strategy early on in life.
When my classmates discovered the amusing nature of my last name in third and fourth grade and began making fun of me about it, I quickly realized that if I could make fun of my name in ways even better than my classmates, I could become the funniest person in the room.
I could steal the power from my enemies and transform it into something good for me.
So I quickly started writing jokes about my name.
I still use many of those jokes onstage today. They still make audiences laugh.
Thirty years later, I was one of a dozen Americans who sued Donald Trump (via The Knight Foundation) for blocking me on Twitter after he declared his Twitter feed an “official White House channel.” When we won that lawsuit, forcing Trump to unblock me, my name was published in the New York Times, which led to an onslaught of hate and threats directed at me online.
My response?
I reposted many of these hate-filled messages alongside expressions of gratitude for all the attention they were bringing me.
This response incensed the trolls, but it garnered me many followers and an outpouring of support.
Rather than ignoring the criticism or hiding from it, I highlighted it. Celebrated it. Laughed in its face. In doing so, I won. The trolls disappeared, but my new followers stayed.
We can all learn from Liquid Death’s response to criticism:
Recognize its value and exploit it. Make hay from it.
Don’t flee from the criticism. Don’t ignore it, hide from it, or hope it will go away.
Instead, steal its power. Turn it into something of value. Demonstrate your utter lack of concern for the words that others as
Be Brash, smart, and confident.
Everything people want in their brands.
