Liquid Death does everything wrong
Case study
But as Rory Sutherland says:
In physics, the opposite of a good idea is wrong. In marketing, the opposite of a good idea, can be another good idea.
Here are some of the unorthodox marketing choices Liquid Death made that many experts would consider wrong:
You don’t “join,’ you “sell your soul”
Turned their hate comments into a Spotify playlist
Instead of boring, plastic bottles, they went with alcohol/energy drink vibe cans
They’ve got an axe-wielding, can-headed, people-decapitating mascot
Get others to do your marketing for you… for free!
Taking a page out of Dave Trott’s book. They knew they couldn’t compete with water brands’ marketing budgets. Some of those are owned by Coke (Dasani for example).
So instead what they did is use organic marketing which Trott calls earned media (The Power of Ignorance).
Liquid Death started a campaign to get people to “crack a can open in the dumbest way possible.”
Here’s #crackopenawater on Tik Tok.
And here it is on Instagram:
All free, user-generated-content (UCG) or Earned Media.
Taking the ghetto MVP to a whole new level
We launched on Facebook and didn’t even have a product. We had a 3D render of a product.
We shot a $1,500 commercial and made it seem real just to test the idea first.
To quote Bill Bernbach:
It may well be that creativity is the last unfair advantage we're legally allowed to take over our competitors.
This took me a long time to make so if you enjoyed it, please retweet it on Twitter! I’ll bribe you with IOUs.
Here’s the link:
