The brilliant marketing of Liquid Death 💦☠️
So I brainstormed 6 other subject lines for this post:
The ultimate name for the most ubiquitous product
How to sell something that almost everyone has
How to charge 100x more for a product that was already “free”
How to sell Earth's original natural resource
How to name a product nobody ever “wants” to buy
The weirdest name for the simplest product
I ended up choosing emojis because I thought they were more entertaining.
Anyway. Let’s do this.
3 ... 2 ... 🎬
Last night around 8:30 pm, I rolled out my yoga mat, busted out a foam roller, and prepared to stretch for about 30 minutes.
But before I got started, I wanted something to quench my thirst during what I knew would be the worst of rolling out my left quad.
(Seriously, it makes me want to die.)
So I whip open the fridge door, scan the contents, and lock eyes with my victim.
Behind an old pizza box and some shriveled fruit, it’s sitting there, lonely in the corner.
A can of dangerous, heavily guarded, top-secret …
Liquid Death.
Lol. You’ve heard of this drink before. Right?
It’s in Whole Foods and a bunch of other grocery stores.
BUT if you live under a rock in Texas where all you drink is Ranch Water and Ramblers, let me let you in on the joke.
Liquid Death is …
💦 W A T E R 💦
Well, technically it’s “drinking water from the alps,” according to the packaging (and verified by the label — it is from the Austrian Alps!)
Now, there are a ton of different things to talk about when it comes to Liquid Death.
They have an insane brand. They have an environmental mission. Etc etc etc.
But what I really love is their name, and how it functions through the lens of copywriting.
Consider the maturation of the “bottled” water market over the last 10 or so years.
Water bottles with (less) plastic > boxed water > canned water.
But while boxed water was a new enough product to stand alone in name, “canned” water just wasn’t going to cut it.
There are plenty of things that are canned and drinkable (not so much with boxes).
So instead of calling it “canned” water, they went outside the literal.
They went for irony. Shock.
And of course, pure personality — intertwining taglines like “murder your thirst” and “death to plastic” — throughout their brand.
To me, it’s brilliant. And also a perfect case study in market sophistication.
If you’re just encountering the brand for the first time, you can’t NOT find out what it is. It’s magnetic.
Especially with the controversial “death” in the name.
Liquid Death found a way to sell what is likely the #1 commodity in the world — with ridiculous competition — by choosing a name that can’t NOT capture your attention.
Yum.
David Patrick
