Liquid Death Has The Best Marketing in Water
I recently came across a new brand of canned water called Liquid Death and I LOVE it (well, I love the branding and marketing, I haven’t actually tried the product yet). In a category full of messages about being “pure” and “natural” and from remote untouched bodies of water, Liquid Death tells you to “Murder Your Thirst.” Contrasting the typical category imagery of remote mountains and flowing spring water (almost literally a Sea of Sameness), Liquid Death looks and acts more like a heavy metal band than a bottled water brand.
When we do branding and positioning for a new product, we often do what’s called a Category White Space Analysis where we look at the branding, messaging, and imagery from all of the competitors in the category and see what ideas are already owned and what ideas can be owned by a new brand. Liquid Death’s branding and positioning (if I had to guess, probably something like, “the brand that makes drinking water bad ass”) is miles from the nearest brand on the bottled water White Space Analysis. And that has many advantages, not least of which is just being different. If you’re in a store and you want water, but not like, the water that yuppies that go to hot yoga drink or the water they give you on middle school field trips, Liquid Death is for you. In an extremely crowded category, Liquid Death has a wide open lane to target a totally untapped slice of the 100% of people who need to drink water to survive.
What many marketers fail to realize when contemplating straying even one tenth of one percent off of the expected path for the category they’re in is that you can still deliver necessary category messages while standing out. In a Facebook ad (that I can’t find again), Liquid Death says something like, ‘Dehydration will kill you if you let it, and not in a humane way, in a slow and painful way. Murder your thirst with Liquid Death.’ That’s the same message about hydration being critical to overall health and the ability of [Every Water Brand Ever] to quench your thirst. Only Liquid Death’s message stands out, and is way cooler.
Perhaps even more importantly than messaging, Liquid Death shows us that you can be an altruistic player in your space even with unique (in this case, over-aggressive, death-themed) branding. Liquid Death is packaged in a fully-recyclable aluminum can and is committed to #DeathtoPlastic (according to the Liquid Death website, “plastic is not even technically recyclable anymore because it is no longer profitable to recycle”). In addition to donating 10% of the profits from every can to help “kill” plastic pollution, Liquid Death has run a campaign about the overflow of plastic from earth into the underworld and a campaign called Loving Homes for Plastic to mail plastic bottles back to Coke and Pepsi so they don’t end up in landfills. This is an altruistic initiative befitting a brand like Patagonia or TOMS and yet 100% in line with the defiant and irreverent personality of Liquid Death.
I work mostly in the healthcare space and I find it to be a space that can particularly take lessons from Liquid Death. Liquid Death believes that “positive healthy change doesn’t have to be boring and artless.” I couldn’t agree more. Actually, I would go further to say that sometimes positive healthy change can’t come from something boring and artless. Liquid Death’s “totally evil plan to make people laugh and get more of them to drink more water more often” is exactly the way we should be thinking about healthcare marketing.
All healthcare brands play in more-or-less the exact same space. They all want to be innovative, hopeful, empowering, and empathetic to the serious disease they’re treating. And that’s worked…as well as it’s worked. I think most of us would agree that they could be doing better. So who says healthcare brands need to act the way they do? Why not try something different? Be funny, be sarcastic, be edgy, be the opposite of what everyone expects. You might just get a few more of the 100% of people for whom being healthy is important to take more ownership of their health through engaging with your brand.