Liquid Death’s Sales Secret Isn’t Comedy, It’s a Ruthless Media Strategy
Liquid Death’s wild, irreverent marketing campaigns are crucial for a brand selling canned water. It even intends to make a splash at the upcoming Super Bowl 60, with its second Big Game ad buy.
But Liquid Death’s strategy to drive sales is as important as its comedic skits in getting the product moving off the shelves.
Liquid Death’s challenge, like many CPGs, is quickly connecting its media investment to store sales.
Traditionally, CPGs use marketing mix modeling, but getting results can take months. And return on ad spend, the main benchmark for retail media networks, doesn’t assess incremental sales, which are sales generated from an ad campaign.
“ROAS looks good, but you waste your budget,” said Benoit Vatere, Liquid Death’s chief media officer on stage at Brandweek.
Measuring sales is particularly complicated for Liquid Death because it’s not a direct-to-consumer company—meaning it doesn’t sell its own products and therefore cannot directly see purchase activity. Instead, Liquid Death is sold in a number of different retail environments, meaning that the brand must work directly with retailers to get and ingest sales data.
“It’s a lot of work and money from a data standpoint,” Vatere said. “The cost of data is crazy.”
Liquid Death works with Ibotta, a digital promotions platform that aggregates sales data from retailers like Dollar General, Walmart, and others. Not having to work with all those retailers directly, Vatere said, makes his life a lot easier.
Ibotta also estimates incremental sales across its network of retailers, said company founder and CEO Bryan Leach, who shared the stage with Vatere. This helps CPG clients make better decisions about where to put their spend, he added.
In Liquid Death’s case, the brand can avoid offering discounts to people who would have bought the product anyway, like customers who routinely buy a case every couple of weeks.
“That happens a lot if I don’t have the tools to prevent it,” Vatere said. “And it’s a really heavy investment for no return.”
Liquid Death also has found a way to grow incremental sales cheaply. Increasing sales doesn’t just come from finding net-new households to buy its products, Vatere said. It’s more efficient to increase the frequency with which existing customers buy.
