Waterboy doesn’t regret that brand trip

Creator Madi Marotta’s first official day on the job as Waterboy’s new social media manager was a tropical and eventful one.

The electrolyte additive company was off on its second-ever brand trip, this year to Tulum, Mexico, with some big-name influencers, their plus-ones, and regular-schmegular customers all in tow. With 38 people representing the brand in some capacity, they were there mostly to party and hang out, and Marotta was there to capture it all.

She created dozens of social videos for TikTok, many taking a casual, creator-as-brand-voice approach and showing Waterboy’s guests indulging in the party scene. But the TikTok audience was unimpressed with the content she gathered, and she took on what some would consider a rather unfortunate title: worst social media manager ever.

Waterboy’s co-founder and CEO, Mike Xhaxho, wasn’t fazed by the criticism. In fact, his TikTok bio recently described him as a “Madi stan,” and the online backlash has inspired the brand’s latest TikTok series featuring Marotta trying to figure out how to be a “good” social media manager, humorously leaning into the critique. While he told us that the brand trip’s social content wasn’t designed to spark outrage, the team tried to make the most of it, and it fit into the brand’s untraditional approach to marketing.

“It’s just who we are, which is a little bit polarizing, for better or worse,” Xhaxho said.

Customer love?

For Waterboy’s inaugural brand trip last year, it focused on inviting customers as a way to appreciate their supporters and in response to online sentiment that seemed to shift away from over-the-top influencer trips, Xhaxho said.

This year, Xhaxho said the strategy was to “double dip” by inviting customers and influencers like Kelsey Anderson, Brandon Edelman (better known as Bran Flakezz), and Ken Eurich, in addition to guests of influencers who were followers chosen via sweepstakes hosted on the influencers’ accounts.

“That’s still the thesis, that we’re doing a customer trip,” Xhaxho said. “But how cool would it maybe be for the customers to be able to party and hang out alongside their favorite creators?”

Some TikTok viewers picked up on this thesis, but several were displeased with its execution online, calling out the brand for seeming to only show the influencers and not customers or followers in its videos. Xhaxho said this was intentionally in response to feedback the brand received on last year’s brand trip, where some viewers said the customers shown in last year’s videos seemed like they were being forced to create ads.

“It feels like on social right now, everything’s kind of under that magnifying glass,” Xhaxho said. “And maybe certain customers view these trips as lavish and wasteful, but for us, it still helps achieve reach and awareness cost effectively.”

Show me the goods

During the trip, Marotta helmed 42 TikToks posted to the Waterboy account. Of those, Marketing Brew counted 10 videos that featured mentions of the product or showed it on screen. Still, one of the chief critiques from TikTok commenters was that the product wasn’t shown enough, or positioned as a hangover cure for the partyers on screen.

Xhaxho said that Waterboy doesn’t go into its brand trips with “elaborate plans around exactly the content we want to capture.” Rather, the team approaches the trips with high-level goals like driving awareness. As for marketing it as a hangover cure, he said that’s never been part of the brand’s messaging.

“We don’t want to communicate that, ‘Hey, we have this weekend recovery product that you can go out and get smashed, take this, and wake up feeling fine,’ because that’s not what it does, and we’re fine showcasing content in which it’s not that,” he said. “I know one element of the controversy [online] was, ‘If they took Waterboy, why are they hungover?’ It’s like, well, Waterboy is not this perfect hangover preventer. We would not be charging you $2 a stick if we somehow had the cure for hangovers.”

Overall, viewers were also unsatisfied with the brand’s production level, commenting on details like camera quality and Marotta’s content style, with one person writing “nothing about this page screams professional or very put together” and suggesting the content was more suited to a personal account. But to Xhaxho, Marotta’s style was a key part of why he hired her, as he felt it aligned with the brand.

“Her content style is very much like talking to the camera, vlogging, high energy, so we felt like that would be someone that would be able to document the trip,” he said. “The idea of the content on the trip was, ‘How do we make someone feel like they’re there?’”

Standing out

Despite the criticism, Xhaxho told us that during and immediately following the trip, the company saw its best month of sales across its website, Amazon, and retail in the company’s history, though he declined to share specific sales numbers. Now, it’s all about continuing the moment.

“We found ourselves in this interesting echo chamber of ‘You’re so bad at marketing,’ and then we made the most of that moment,” he said. “But it’s like, how do we continue to grow the brand and create more of our own earned moments?”

As the Waterboy TikTok account doubles down, Xhaxho said he doesn’t regret the way the Tulum trip played out. Ultimately, if some consumers associate Waterboy with “bad” marketing, Xhaxho said there are worse things for a brand to be associated with, like poor customer relations or having an undesirable product, and he sees Marotta’s content approach as a way to stand out while remaining true to the brand.

“We don’t need everyone to love us because unfortunately, in trying to do so, I think what will end up happening is everyone will just feel very lukewarm at best,” he said. “It’s okay if we can have 10% of people love us and 90% of people hate us. That’s better than everyone else feeling pretty indifferent.”