The Week in BDSM: Why Liquid Death Is Beating the Hell Out of Modern Marketing

Welcome to This Week in BDSM 
(Business Development, Sales, and Marketing, obvs).

If you thought it was bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism, you’re sick. I like it.

Here’s how the show & blog works ~ I run a marketing agency. I read a lot of articles on business, sales, and marketing throughout the week. Most of them are bad. Some of them are useful. A very small number of them are worth your time. I pull those out, tell you what matters, and save you the effort, because reading is for dorks and nobody has the attention span anyway.

This week’s article comes from Marketing Brew. It’s about Liquid Death and how they’ve built one of the most effective social marketing machines on the internet by committing to one thing.

Being entertaining.

I should say this up front. I don’t like Liquid Death. I’ve bought it twice. I don’t think it tastes good. I don’t drink water. I drink bourbon like a grown man with a mustache. If I drink water, it comes out of the air conditioner like God intended.

That has nothing to do with why they’re winning.

Liquid Death Isn’t Selling Water

Liquid Death is not in the water business.

They’re in the attention business.

They’re competing with TikTok, Instagram, memes, creators, group chats, and whatever else is trying to hijack your brain while you’re doomscrolling on the couch. That’s why their head of marketing says their goal is to be the funniest thing in your feed on any given day.

Not the healthiest.
Not the most responsibly sourced.
Not the most sustainable.

The funniest.

That alone puts them ahead of most brands, because most brands are still trying to explain themselves while everyone else is trying to make people laugh.

Nobody Reads Ads

Howard Gossage figured this out decades ago.

Howard Gossage said nobody reads advertising. They read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.

Liquid Death took that seriously.

They ran a campaign giving away a four hundred thousand dollar fighter jet as a joke. They created a pit diaper so you can piss your pants in a mosh pit. They released an album made entirely from hate comments pulled from their own product reviews.

None of this explains the product. None of it educates the consumer. None of it would survive a focus group.

And none of that matters.

Because it gets watched. It gets shared. It gets talked about. People know the brand. People want to be associated with it. That’s the job.

Focus Groups Are Where Good Ideas Go to Die

You would never end up with Liquid Death by asking consumers what they want.

You’d end up with softer cans, nicer colors, a calmer tone, and a brand that disappears into the shelf with everything else. Consumers don’t design bold brands. They react to them after they exist.

Liquid Death doesn’t talk about calories. They don’t talk about ingredients. They don’t lead with benefits. Nobody cares.

They show up confident, weird, and fully committed. You either get it or you don’t. That confidence is the product.

Mercedes doesn’t ask my opinion on how to build a car. They don’t need it. They’re better at it than I am. That’s why I want one.

Superfluous Bullshit Works

Rory Sutherland talks about the value of superfluous bullshit. Things that don’t matter logically but matter emotionally.

Extra fries in the bag.
A warm cookie at a hotel.
A pointless distinction that makes something feel special.

Liquid Death is built almost entirely out of superfluous bullshit. None of it improves hydration. All of it improves memorability. That’s marketing.

Efficiency doesn’t make brands interesting. Stories do.

The Founder Knew Exactly What He Was Doing

The origin of Liquid Death isn’t complicated.

Founder Mike Cessario noticed that bands sponsored by Monster would play entire sets with Monster-branded cups on stage, filled with water. Nobody wanted to drink energy drinks while performing for hours. Water had no cool brand attached to it.

That was the opening.

Cessario studied people like Richard Branson, who said the fastest way to get rich and famous is to take a boring category and make it interesting. Water qualified. Nobody was advertising it in a way that made people feel anything.

So he did.

Now he makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year selling something people used to get for free. That hurts. It should hurt.

Marketing Didn’t Drift Here. It Was Driven.

This is why Liquid Death makes marketers uncomfortable.

They expose how much of the industry has become fear-based. Marketing today is built around defensibility. Dashboards. Attribution models. Slides designed to survive meetings, not audiences.

Being interesting creates risk. Being boring creates cover.

Liquid Death chooses risk. Most teams aren’t allowed to. That’s the difference.

Be Interesting or Don’t Bother

That’s the takeaway.

You’re not competing with companies in your category. You’re competing with everything else in the feed. If your marketing doesn’t earn attention, it doesn’t deserve it.

That’s what This Week in BDSM exists to do. Cut through the noise. Point at what works. Call bullshit on what doesn’t.

Next week, we’ll do it again.