Liquid I.V. Taps Former Poppi Marketer as Category Competition Heats Up

Liquid I.V. has hired Jenny Danzi, a beverage marketing veteran who most recently led brand, creative, culture and media at Poppi, as its new chief marketing officer. The move comes as the powdered hydration category Liquid I.V. helped pioneer draws an expanding field of rivals, and as the company looks for its next growth lever beyond product innovation alone.

Danzi's resume is built for this moment. Before Poppi, she spent more than 17 years at PepsiCo, working across Pepsi, Mountain Dew and other beverage brands. That background in scaled, culturally relevant beverage marketing is precisely what Liquid I.V. is betting on as it tries to defend category leadership against a growing set of competitors.

Why it matters: Liquid I.V. built the hydration-mix category. Building it and defending it are different jobs. "With success comes competition," Danzi told Axios. The real test, she said, is not just getting more people to love the product. It's getting them to feel a sense of community with the brand, and then to talk about it.

That distinction is the crux of her strategy. A product can be well-loved without being well-discussed. Liquid I.V. needs both.

The Visibility Problem

Consumer health and wellness products face a structural marketing challenge that sneakers and branded water bottles don't. You can see someone wearing Nikes. You can't see what they're drinking from a packet mixed into a water bottle after a workout. Danzi described Liquid I.V. as "highly functional, aspirational, but not something that you immediately know is a badge value brand."

That invisibility problem shapes her entire playbook. Without a visible logo or physical cue, the brand has to manufacture its own visibility through news, content and shared experience. Danzi wants to generate "enough shareable news that people actually want to share the gospel of Liquid I.V." New flavors. Clinical research. Branded merchandise. Each becomes a potential trigger for word-of-mouth that a product alone can't deliver.

Liquid I.V. has leaned on two pillars since its founding: scientific credibility and cultural relevance. Danzi's job is to connect them rather than treat them as separate workstreams. "Why is hydration important to you as a person?" she asked. "How do we make sure that when you're standing at the shelf, you're choosing Liquid I.V. because you understand that science-backed product and what it's going to do for you?"

That's a shift from feature-based marketing to identity-based marketing. It's a harder story to tell, but a stickier one if it works.

Creators factor heavily into her approach, though she's careful to separate two distinct uses of the channel. One is a short-term visibility play: a burst of activity designed to make the brand feel omnipresent online for a moment. The other is a longer, relationship-driven lane built on direct, ongoing partnerships. "There will be moments where it's a one-off pulse to make it feel like it's everywhere on the internet, and there should be a real always-on lane that is a direct relationship with creators," she said.

The distinction matters because the two modes serve different goals and require different investment. A pulse campaign buys attention. An always-on relationship buys trust, and trust is what turns a creator into a believable advocate rather than a paid mouthpiece. Danzi said creators work best when they have direct relationships with people inside the brand, understand its worldview, and are "given the space to interpret that for their audience in an ownable way." That's a looser leash than many consumer brands are comfortable granting, but it's consistent with how she talks about advocacy more broadly: the brand provides the substance, the audience and its intermediaries provide the voice.

Communications sits inside Danzi's remit too, and she's explicit about where she thinks that function has been undervalued. Too often, communications teams receive a finished marketing brief and are asked to promote it. Danzi wants the opposite. "Communications should be a pillar of every marketing leadership team," she said. "I don't think they are a recipient of the brief. They should be a partner in building it."

The payoff of that structural change, in her view, is coherence. "From product all the way to the person drinking it, there's a clear through line that makes sense," she said. Without that thread, brands risk losing the shareability and buzz that make their stories travel in the first place. A disjointed message doesn't just underperform. It fails to generate the organic repetition that turns a single campaign into sustained cultural presence.

Taken together, Danzi's agenda reads less like a conventional marketing refresh and more like an attempt to rewire how Liquid I.V. thinks about growth. Rather than treating advertising, creator partnerships and press as separate levers pulled independently, she wants them unified around a single goal: giving existing customers a reason to talk, and giving that talk a consistent shape.

The Bottom Line

Danzi's appointment signals that Liquid I.V. views its next growth phase as a communications and advocacy problem, not merely a product or distribution one. The category she's entering is more crowded than the one Liquid I.V. first conquered, and category leadership alone no longer guarantees share gains. Her bet, informed by PepsiCo scale and Poppi's culturally driven playbook, is that customers who feel community with a brand will do marketing work that paid media can't replicate. Whether that bet pays off will show up in harder-to-fake metrics over the coming quarters: repeat purchase rates, organic mention volume, and whether Liquid I.V. can hold shelf share as competitors multiply. For a category built on function over flash, turning invisible consumption into visible advocacy is the real test ahead.