“Thanks for supporting the cult,” is how Liquid Death signs off its customer service emails – which, by the way, aren’t sent from a ‘representative’ or an ‘executive’, but a ‘Customer Service Overlord’. It’s part of what the brand’s VP of creative Andy Pearson describes as “the magic of Liquid Death”. And it’s potent magic they’re working with, with the company valued at $700m this year, despite only launching in 2019.

Pearson, who joined the business a year ago, believes Liquid Death might be the world’s first truly viral product. As the legend goes, co-founder and CEO Mike Cessario started the business by producing a $1,500 video, putting $600 of paid media behind it, and launching Liquid Death onto social media. Millions of views later, distributors and grocery stores were getting in touch to stock the canned water.

“The original idea was to can the water so it looks like beer and have some fun with that,” says Pearson. “They went through a bunch of different [name] ideas and the thought was that we have zero marketing dollars, and we’re competing on shelves. What’s the one thing we can name this so that if you saw it on your shelf, you’d have to take out your phone, take a picture of it, and send it to someone or post about it. It really was, from the very beginning, a product designed to go viral.”

Liquid Death has found huge success in what Pearson describes as “seemingly backwards ideas that we use as marketing”. Creative stunts include releasing albums of negative social media comments, which were turned into metal and punk tracks and entitled Greatest Hates; hiring a witch to infuse its water with real demons; and filming its own feature length horror film, Dead Til Death. There’s also a delightful range of severed human hand candles, made in partnership with Martha Stewart, obviously.

Some of this creative approach, as well as Liquid Death’s branding, links back to its roots in the world of punk and heavy metal. Cessario, a former creative director at Netflix, has said the idea was inspired by rock bands secretly filling energy drink cans with water. These brands are often sponsors of major music events, meaning artists have to be seen to toe the corporate line, whether they want to or not. Pearson says Liquid Death strives to embrace this heritage, and disorientate people by doing things that “your typical idea of a business would never do”.

It’s become quite fashionable for brands to say they don’t believe in traditional advertising – Brewdog founder James Watt once said he’d rather set fire to his money – but according to Pearson, Liquid Death is genuinely trying to do things differently. “I think it’s probably a personal vendetta after years of working in marketing,” he tells CR. “One of the constant human conditions is being marketed to. No matter what happens, you can’t escape advertising and marketing, so we’re poking at that very notion. We’re doing this thing where it’s universal. Everyone gets the reference of like, ‘oh damn, another fucking ad’. You’re already annoyed, so we’re already on your side with that.”

How Liquid Death gets around this is with humour (80s-style Bert Kreischer workout video anyone?), which Pearson describes as the basis of every single thing the brand does. The goal is to entertain rather than annoy people, and move away from a model focused purely on buying people’s eyeballs. “It’s like, ‘hey, we made this thing you probably don’t really like and we’re going to spend even more money to make sure you watch it a bunch of times until you just finally agree and buy our product’,” says Pearson. “All we try and do is make a great piece of entertainment and put it out into the world. Our whole thing is to win the internet for the day, and make the best thing someone is going to see that day.”

It helps that Liquid Death was set up by a creative. Pearson says Cessario wants every single touchpoint of the brand to give you a smile – from copywriting on the side of the can describing the “proprietary thirst murdering process”, to the names of products (Mango Chainsaw, Severed Lime, Berry It Alive). Creative work is dreamt up and produced in-house, with a trusted pool of creative collaborators, and there’s no such thing as a Liquid Death brand style guide. “If we made a brand book, no-one would read it to begin with and it’s all meaningless anyway,” jokes Pearson. “There’s not this rigid sense of things – like, ‘we’re sassy but not smarmy’, ‘we’re this but not that’.

“I think the brand is really complex, and nuanced,” he continues. “It seems easy from the outside but it’s extremely nuanced. I have this notion I’ve been spouting lately that it’s not even a brand. I think of it more as writing for a character on a TV show … there’s this character, Liquid Death, and you understand it and its motivations and what’s gone before.”

According to Pearson, this approach streamlines the creative process, allowing the team to move quickly, while leaving room for experimentation. As he says: “The great thing is, characters can surprise you and that’s probably the most exciting part of a show – when a character does something you didn’t think they would do, but it makes sense for who they are. That’s also this multifaceted nature of the brand where we do something occasionally that’s heartfelt or sincere in our own Liquid Death way.”

Amid all this playfulness, there is a more serious side with Pearson saying Liquid Death is offers a different and much-needed new version of sustainability.

“People who haven’t seen the brand before are saying, ‘This is the end of capitalism, they’re putting water in a can and selling it back to us’. Which is really funny to me because, have you not noticed what plastic bottles have been doing for decades now? It’s wild it would incense people when it’s literally the same product, we’re just putting it in a more sustainable, recyclable form factor.

“I think Liquid Death was really born out of this notion that healthy, sustainable products and brands are marketed to a very select group of people that are already on the bus,” he adds. “We don’t need to talk to those people any more. The whole idea was to take the healthiest thing in the world, water – it doesn’t get more neutral than that – and package it as one of the least healthy things in the world, and have all the fun that unhealthy brands have selling this crap we shouldn’t be drinking, or don’t need, or putting plastic pollution into oceans and landfills. Let’s take all of that fun and apply it to something that can help people make healthier choices, and help customers change the way they think about sustainability.”

Bottled water brands are definitely taking note of Liquid Death’s success – more and more canned waters are coming to market – and it’s something Pearson says he’s excited to see, because it means a potential impact at a larger environmental scale. Can they reach the same level of brand love? According to him, over a hundred people have branded themselves with a Liquid Death tattoo, including one person who’s inked one on their head. It’s hard to imagine Dasani or Evian beating that.

liquiddeath.com