The Ironic Rise of Liquid Death

By Drew Letendre

© Copyright Drew Letendre, 2023

Perhaps there is no gap in the literature to be filled by a case study to demonstrate the power of branding, even or especially in the case of heavily trafficked, mature, commodities--like bottled water. That said, the explosive, seemingly death-defying success of ‘Liquid Death,’ the latest potable water on offer in the grocery aisles, is a veritable phenomenon. Its meteoric rise is all the more remarkable given its facially morbid persona. And I find it doubly fascinating--not only is it venturing into exhausted territory--but doing it in a strangely macabre wardrobe. It looks like

a perishable Halloween brand. It should have been DOA. But it was a wager on the power of creative destruction/disruption: the CEO intentionally want after not just a dumb name, but ‘the dumbest name you could come up with for a healthy product.’

If ever there was a commodity category, it’s bottled drinking water. We all know there is nothing or next to nothing in the container that is materially differentiating. No secret sauce--indeed, that very idea seems inimical to water’s Holy Grail of perfect purity. Water is water is water, more or less. If that is true, then the brand--and particularly the packaging and design--does all of the heavily lifting.

Enter Liquid Death. A more morbid--dare I say it, necrophiliac--brand would be hard to imagine, with its iconography of skulls, bones, and other memento mori, and a darkly humorous nomenclature, to boot. Consider the tagline, ‘Murder your thirst’ and sub-brand names like, ‘Severed Lime,’ ‘Mango Chainsaw,’ ‘Berry It Alive,’ and ‘Rest In Peach.’ For what it’s worth, the

Liquid Death ‘portfolio’ is a master class in brand system building and the virtue of consistency--even as its arch-thematic stands in violent contrast to the salutary (and sustainably packaged) product it identifies.

Due precisely to its arresting aesthetic, it is also a brand with lots of ‘stopping power.’ I’ll not forget my first encounter with those lurid skulls leering at me from the cold case, in contrast to the pale backdrop of transparent plastic and glass containers, the too-familiar landscape of Perrier’s and Pellegrino’s. I thought they had misplaced some beer or hard cider. That said to court death (as a brand theme) seems like, well, courting death (commercially). Apparently, not so.

It is hard to imagine that what’s inside cans of Liquid Death would experientially eclipse competitors in an apples-to-apples face off. A 2022 Bon Appetit online piece mentions Gillian Lange, a bartender from central Illinois, whose “love for the canned water isn’t just about the flavor or carbonation. It’s also about the brand as a whole. ‘The whole gimmick,’ she says. ‘The logo, the names they have for their flavored waters, and even the tagline.’” Right from the horse’s mouth. Maybe it’s a bit about the product, but it’s really the brand about which she waxes enthusiastic.

And maybe there is a little something to the experiential piece. Liquid Death is also a bit of a twist on the category: the convention is ‘bottled water.’ Liquid Death is ‘canned’ water. And more to it, as the Bon Appetit article importantly points out, the can is a ‘tall boy,’ a container format associated with beer. This gives the product another layer of edginess and irony. But, in addition to this coy flirtation with the associations of death and alcohol, maybe cold-water tastes better

out of a can. I tried it and I thought so. I’d never consumed still water from a can and wouldn’t have anticipated a pleasant experience--water and metal mingling.

According to the Bon Appetit article (‘How Liquid Death Became Gen Z’s La Croix’), “Liquid Death (had become) the third best-selling carbonated water brand on Amazon and its most recent round of funding has bolstered the company's valuation to a staggering $700 million. Mike Cessario, Liquid Death's co-founder and CEO, attributes much of the brand's success to its marketing.” Cessario could have just as easily (and just as verily) attributed its success to the brand, allowing for the fluid--no pun--boundary between them. But it begs the question: how could such a dark brand succeed so well--or at all?

To be sure, the internet and social media have furnished a plethora of novel brand touchpoints--an extraordinary hyperextension of the brand, if you will--that didn’t exist and were virtually unimaginable in the recent past. The Bon Appetit article talks about this--the capacity for (and spur to) cult-formation, the provision of an identity signifier that gives rise to a community with a ‘way of life’ and virtual capital city where the lingua franca is irony and a fashionable nihilism.

That nihilism can be said to be so (i.e., fashionable) because--irony again--the product (the brand and the company) pay off and proclaim sustainability as a virtue: aluminum cans are infinitely recyclable, compared to the toxic plastic containers used by competitors. And what is more, the brand has brilliantly integrated that with the slogan, ‘Death to plastic,’ a virtue that gained it entry to the shelves at Whole Foods.

We can’t really be celebrating death (and by implication, extinction), except tongue in cheekbone, if we support sustainability as a value. But the larger point is that, with Liquid Death, we are well beyond water. We’ve tapped into more than that. We’ve tapped into something thicker than water: generational identity (Gen Z), a generation marked by a sort of fixed ironic smirk. The brand can fly off on its own, if you will, becoming a fun house mirror to the demographic rather than a predictable paean to purity, refreshment, and the whole train of tired epithets we’re conditioned to expect. That’s part of the secret, I think, to how Liquid Death has fared so spectacularly. Perhaps the final irony can be put this way: with Liquid Death, it is not water that we’re drinking. It’s the ‘Cool Aid.’ Liquid Death is just cool.