![]() ![]() Water is liquid death.” In the following three months after the ad’s launch, the company had amassed more Facebook followers than Pepsi-owned Aquafina. “Water is not a girly drink for yoga mums” the ad says. ![]() Liquid Death’s debut ad, which features a man being waterboarded for the spot’s duration (it’s way funnier than it sounds), cost $1.5k to make and within three months had 3m views. But it’s hard to argue that in mostly uninteresting categories such as packaged water, deliberately flipping a 180 on category conventions can offer results. For many marketers, the approach the brand has taken may seem a little too literal and pronounced. Liquid Death is typical of a challenger brand in both its mindset and behaviours. And if the dominant emotion in the industry is about tranquillity, health and being serious, the brand instead makes water sound exciting, dangerous, and pretty weird. Where the water category’s conventional colours are white and sky blue, Liquid Death choose black as its primary brand colour. Where consumers might usually see mountains and the alps, we hear of Earth’s underworld. In a category that is so often about life and vitality, Liquid Death instead talks about demons, death, murdering (thirst) and killing (plastic). Liquid Death, the mountain water brand, appear to agree as it’s taken a similarly direct and contrarian approach to entering the bottled water category. ![]() It’s a sure-fire and straightforward way to bring differentiation to a brand and interest to a category. We have a brand exercise we use at eatbigfish called ‘Flip.’ We ask the client to identify the conventions, practices and typical behaviours of the category and then deliberately flip them to see what that might look like for their brand. ![]()
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