The number of ‘I told you sos’ on LinkedIn following news Liquid Death is to withdraw from the UK was notable.

Indeed, when I heard the news I assumed it had been hit by the almost inevitable failure of a new brand to achieve the rate of sale needed to maintain a listing in some of the UK’s largest grocers. I know from personal experience at Britvic when I used to run ‘seed brands’ how hard it can be to meet the benchmark needed to sustain distribution, even with the resources of a multinational brand owner.

Speaking to the Liquid Death team, the story was somewhat different. And less dramatic. Having relocated production to the US it didn’t make sense to try and support an international market expansion with the significant on-cost that entails, for now at least.

What does this tell us about one of the most impressive challenger brands in the drinks market today? A brand that let’s not forget was recently valued at $1.4bn (£1.11bn) after just seven years.

The challenge of canning water

Anyone who has listened to my interview on Uncensored CMO with the founder of Liquid Death Mike Cessario will know that canning water is much harder than you might think. In fact, unless you have millions to spare it’s close to impossible.

Why is it so hard when there are so many fizzy drinks in cans? The answer lies in where spring water is sourced. Fizzy drinks are canned in industrial estates in low-cost parts of the country so the only way to put spring water in a can is to ship spring water from the origin or build your own canning line in a hard-to-reach spring water source.

It makes sense for Liquid Death to come back to the UK when it can provide the same kind of sustainable support it has in the US and that can’t be done when the P&L doesn’t allow it.

With production now being in the US, the cost of shipping to the UK is extremely expensive, not exactly environmentally friendly, and creates a larger price premium on-shelf not the ideal context for maintaining an international presence.

Strategist Zoe Scaman summarised it nicely on LinkedIn: “It wasn’t a failure of brand. It was a failure of logistics.”

Liquid Death pulls out of UK despite claiming ‘strong demand’

A lack of promotion

Part of what made the US launch such a brilliant example of a challenger brand is how the team created awareness for the brand even before a single can had been sold. Even now it punches way above its weight making a Super Bowl ad for a fraction of what most brands spend on production. It has set the creative bar high and used its lack of budget to fuel creativity rather than limit it. But what about the UK and what would it take to support the brand here?

Leaving aside the pundits of Marketing LinkedIn, how many people in the UK have actually heard of Liquid Death? I have no data, but I would be surprised if it’s much more than 1%.

Investment in the brand centred on its headline sponsorship of the Download festival and experiences at other Live Nation events.

Bang on the target audience but the benefit of these partnerships happens over years, so it may just have been too early to judge the impact.

When I launched Lipton Ice Tea, for example, the brand saw a compounding effect of the ‘Don’t Knock it Till You Try it’ experiential campaign over the three years I was responsible for the brand. There is a reason marketers must balance the long and short of it.

Ironically it may have been a lack of promotion, not too much of it, that was Liquid Death’s problem.

It makes sense for Liquid Death to come back to the UK when it can provide the same kind of sustainable support it has in the US and that can’t be done when the P&L doesn’t allow it.

UK performance in perspective

The Grocer story that first broke the news of Liquid Death’s withdrawal from the UK, reported the brand had reached £2m of sales revenue, according to Nielsen data.

Some might assume this was a low value given how large we know the brand’s sales are in the US. But context needs to be applied.

It’s easy to be the critic but look beyond the hype and see the scale of the achievement.

During my time at Britvic, I looked at every soft drink launch over a 10-year period using Nielsen data and was astonished to find that only 2% of new soft drink lines achieved more than £1m in the first year.

Looking at the top 20 new soft drink lines over that period, 80% were line extensions, not new brands. Almost every successful new soft drink started small and my own conclusion from the study, given how long it took for the most successful brands to scale up, was it takes an average of seven years to have an overnight success – or about the time Liquid Death has existed in the US.

Playing the long game

One characteristic that marks out great challenger brands is that they make the best use of limited resources to achieve the overall goal.

Liquid Death concentrating on the enormous US water market makes sense as it avoids stretching resources too thinly. It doesn’t have the luxury of a global bottling system and marketing machine like Coke and Pepsi.

By growing rapidly in the US it could create the investment case to look at international expansion in the future with the kind of promotional support it will probably need. It’s a case of losing a tactical battle to win the war.

So, did the Liquid Death withdrawal prove there was a brand problem as many believe? Or did the reality of distributing canned spring water in another continent when you have tough financial trade-offs to make drive the decision?

It’s easy to be the critic but look beyond the hype and see the scale of the achievement, how it beat the odds in a tough market, the power of creativity on a small budget, and yes, even the tactical losses that you have to concede on the path to success.

I’II leave you with a Theodore Roosevelt quote that I think perfectly sums it up: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

Liquid Death may be dusting itself off from a retreat from international markets but it has a habit of cheating death and I think it’ll do it again. Don’t rule it out.