Liquid Death
Quick n’ Dirty
THE PROBLEM
Liquid Death’s new soda flavored sparkling water products contain 90% less sugar than conventional sodas.
With such low sugar, how will Sodaholics who switch to Liquid Death maintain their colossal sugar intake?
THE TARGET
Sodaholics.
THE INSIGHT
THE STRATEGY
THE IDEA
REST OF THE STORY↓
Low sugar marketing is always about less.
Make low sugar about more.
Grave Consequences (for drinking so much sugar)
&
Glugzilla (drink 5 gallons of Liquid Death)
The Brandcenter sprint
is an annual competition held the first week of classes each January featuring live clients for international brands. In January of 2025 the two assignment options were Liquid Death or Lululemon.
Teams were assembled, research began and ideas began to formulate before we were briefed by Andy Pearson, VP of Creative at Liquid Death.
Liquid Death is Planning to capture a percentage of the $122 billion soft drink segment
Andy explained to us, while other brands' advertisements are focused on selling, Liquid Death’s are entertainment.
Brief’s Objective: Win the internet for a day.
Be the antidote to big soda.
Before we started in earnest, we reversed engineered the strategy behind Liquid Death’s crazy content:
Make insane real products
Satirize marketing itself
Use celebs in really unexpected ways
Do something really dumb, but make it seem really smart.
We then evolved these themes into success criteria we could use to evaluate our ideas:
Acknowledge the poison: the excessive sugar in Soda
Make entertainment, not marketing
Satirize marketing
Make something really dumb, make it seem really smart
So you switched from soda to Liquid Death, but doing so you gave up all your favorite sugar side effects. You shouldn’t have to give up MORE side effects just because you’re drinking LESS sugar than ever before.
Now you’ll be able to purchase all of the side effects of soda from Liquid Death with the Grave Consequences bundle.
70%
←Amount of consumers looking to lower their sugar consumption
Why give up MORE side effects?
With products like the Grin Reaper: a mouthguard made of pure sugar, or the Vial of Vile Bile: an inflammatory agent designed to provide gastrointestinal discomfort, you don’t have to leave behind the parts of soda that make soda soda.
low sugar doesn’t have to be about less
Watch the spot here→
But There Was a problem.
But There Was a problem.
Grave Consequences for Grave Consequences
During the Liquid Death briefing, we had been asked for a suite of ideas that could be launched through the year. We generated and began working on a suite of relatively related ideas. Unfortunately, we were the only team to extract this ask from our briefing and all other teams came with a single idea.
In the interest of fairness of time, every team was only allowed to pitch a single idea - and Grave Consequences was on the chopping block.
Our second product idea is best surmised in a single question:
how much Liquid Death would you need to get the same amount of sugar as what you get in a Big Gulp?
It turns out you need a lot.
Like 21 cans. Like 5 gallons of Liquid Death Soda Flavored Sparkling Water.
To solve the sugar intake problem for Liquid Death consumers we created Glugzilla, a container designed to contain similar levels of sugar as a Big Gulp of soda.
In our 16 hour pivoting period we were able to construct a prototype, film and edit a spot and rework our presentation around the new idea.
“Most likely to be a real Liquid Death product”
