Supermarket shelves are drowning in sameness. Water is minimalist and mountainous; smoothies are green and good for you; chocolate is sensual, always rectangular bars with evenly spaced chunks.
Categories are full of codes – patterns so ingrained most brands are afraid to break them. But if you want to be noticed, you have to be brave enough to stand out. And not by nudging those codes, but by destroying them.
Liquid Death’s UK presence might be on pause (for myriad reasons not related to its brand), but in the US, the bottled water challenger is thriving. At just six years old, it has already become a billion-dollar brand.
And why? On paper, it’s water in a can – the most basic of commodities. Product-wise, there’s very little to distinguish it. But on shelf, its power is in looking utterly unlike anything else.
No purity tropes, no mountain ranges, no soothing blues and greens. In fact, at first look you’d assume it was an energy drink in the wrong place.
Black and gold, the flaming skull logo, the tagline “murder your thirst”. It’s aggressive, rebellious, loud – everything the water category isn’t. When a consumer sees a can of Liquid Death next to a bottle of Evian, which one is going to grab their attention and spark their curiosity?
The best disruptors are brave
The reality is, the most disruptive brands in grocery aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets and ad campaigns. They’re the ones brave enough to reject everything the category tells them to be.
Innocent spoke like a mate, not a marketer. Tony’s Chocolonely split its bars unevenly and wrapped them in clashing colours. Each turned the rejection of category convention into competitive advantage.
And in the case of both Tony’s and Innocent, that attitude extended to the product itself. Tony’s introduced unique flavours, bringing a bit of ’Ben & Jerry’s’ thinking to the chocolate aisle. Innocent was the first to bring delicious smoothies to the masses.
Marketers often like to suggest the success of these brands is down to their social purpose – and I don’t want to suggest that’s not important. Sure, Liquid Death talks a good game about plastic reduction. But that’s not why people buy it. They buy it because it looks badass. Shoppers buy Tony’s not because it’s battling modern slavery, but because it stands out and tastes great.
That both brands do good in the world is certainly a bonus.
So if your brand wants to win attention, stop looking at your competitors and start looking at what your category expects from you. Understand what the consumer isn’t getting – find the rulebook, and rip it up.
When your competitors catch up (and they inevitably will), rip it up again. Destroy the codes, and build something people can’t ignore.
Simon Massey, co-founder at Neverland
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