Embrace Death Metal Marketing
A Power Ballad to Liquid Death and Distinctive Assets
I am what you might call a “metalhead”. I love listening to heavy, chugging guitars, the machine gun staccato of double bass drums, face-melting thrash riffs and even the grinding vocals that sound like Cookie Monster gargling nails.
Also, as a marketer, I adore the unapologetic branding of metal bands with their abrasively direct names written in illegible fonts and their eye-catching, sometimes gut-wrenching, album art. This over the top branding leaves no doubt in a consumer’s mind what they are receiving when they purchase the latest Cannibal Corpse or Cattle Decapitation album.
But, understandably, this extreme level of branding coupled with an equally extreme product carves out a relatively small niche of music consumers from the wider market. According to a study in 2018, the Heavy Metal music genre ranked as the 11th most popular music genre in the US out of 15, lagging behind Jazz, Blues, Classical & Opera.
So, when Liquid Death launched their product in 2017 and aligned their entire brand around this esoteric aesthetic, how did it become so wildly successful and grow 100% year over year, becoming a billion dollar company? Especially within such a mismatched product category as safe and innocuous as drinking water?
The truth is that Mike Cessario, Liquid Death’s founder and CEO, didn’t set out with this ambitious goal in mind or anticipate this level of success. He simply wanted to provide a healthy beverage alternative to alcohol at concerts and metal shows.
“I didn’t think it would be this big,”
But being an advertising industry veteran of many years, Mike understood attention grabbing creative and, intentionally or not, highlighted an often overlooked principle for successful branding. I aim to unpack this in further detail, so grab your metal studded battle vest and join me as we stage dive into what made Liquid Death a branding success and how you too can embrace a key fundamental of Death Metal Marketing.
Distinction Beats Differentiation
Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, had this to say about branding in his groundbreaking book from 2010, How Brands Grow:
“Rather than striving for meaningful, perceived differentiation, marketers should seek meaningless distinctiveness. Branding lasts, differentiation doesn’t.”
— Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow (2010)
What does Mr. Sharp mean by this?
Basically, brands often try too hard to point out the benefits or features of their product in their marketing material, hoping that this causes their brand to stand out compared to their competitors. But what this usually does is lead to bloated marketing communication and forgettable ad campaigns attempting to fill consumer’s minds with information that they don’t actually care about or, more importantly, remember.
Sharp continues on to establish that by building distinctive assets, brands are able to penetrate deep within a consumer’s mind to be recalled when they are making a purchase decision. In the case of Liquid Death you can observe their adherence to focusing on being distinctive by looking at what the brand chooses to promote, or not promote.
One of the main features of Liquid Death products is that they are packaged in tall, sleek metal cans. This is not typical in the drinking water product category but the brand doesn’t focus any of their marketing energy on this fact because they know it’s easily replicable by competitors and not a point of distinction.
Do you know the first drinking water brand to put their product in a can? I didn’t, I had to look it up. It’s a company from the UK called Cano and their entire brand is centered around this fact. However, despite launching their product two years earlier than Liquid Death, even their founder had to admit recently needing to “work twice as hard to keep pace with those that follow.”
If you’d like to dive deeper into the core principles of what makes a brand memorable with a more recent study, London-based advertising agency, VCCP, recently published a new research paper titled “Cracking The Memory Code”. This year-long study focuses on how memory impacts marketing and sales, and asserts a simple, yet powerful, fundamental truth that aligns with Mr. Sharp’s research: “What gets thought of gets bought.”
Distinction at Work
Let’s take a look at another example of how Liquid Death executes this within the category of bottled and sparkling water. Below are five campaign taglines from five leading bottled and sparkling water companies:
- “Life Happens Between Sips”
- “Earth’s Finest Water”
- “Drink to Believe”
- “Water Down Nothing”
- “Murder Your Thirst”
Can you spot Liquid Death’s tagline? And which of the five is more memorable?
Liquid Death understands that effective branding doesn’t need to say something “meaningful” about the product, it just needs to be distinctive enough that a competitor would need a metaphorical crowbar to pry it from the top of a consumer’s consciousness. For Liquid Death this is done through an unapologetic death metal aesthetic. And as mentioned earlier, the results are wildly apparent with Liquid Death currently being valued at $1.4 Billion as of March 2024.
I love using Liquid Death as a case study because it highlights these principles at the most extreme level, but there are plenty of other examples from far less rebellious brands that underscore the effectiveness of distinct assets:
- Cadbury’s famous ad showcasing a gorilla playing Phil Collins
- Budweiser’s unforgettable “Wassup” ad
- The Man Your Man Could Smell Like Old Spice campaign
None of these advertisements say anything “meaningful” about the product they are promoting, they are aiming to be unforgettable pieces of content that have the product clearly featured. The result of these assets is that by being so distinctive the brand takes a shortcut into consumer’s memories so that when it needs to be recalled it has already occupied a portion of the customer’s mind due to how unforgettable the asset was.
Rock On 🤘
My aim with this article is for you to think critically about your marketing assets and their impact, and I mean real impact by being unforgettable and easily recalled when it actually matters. Don’t squander your advertising budget by running a campaign that tries to meekly differentiate and gets lost in the noise; be boldly distinctive and lodge your brand into your customer’s memory. Embrace the tenets of Death Metal Marketing and start headbanging to your own, distinct, tune.
This article is written by
Chris Martin
Let’s connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismartinmba/
