An all-too-literal guillotine league. Chainsawed sandwiches. A moshpit diaper.
Those aren’t just random words jumbled together to test your reading comprehension—they’re the outcome of recent brand collaborations with Liquid Death.
The canned-beverage brand has been inking more than sports partnerships in the last year, striking deals with a bevvy of other big names, including Yahoo Sports (the aforementioned guillotine league), Sheetz (chainsawed sandwiches), and Depends (moshpit diaper), all of which are shown off in splashy social posts.
“We hope to be one of the better things in your feed,” Dan Murphy, SVP of marketing for Liquid Death, told Marketing Brew.
While collaborations are nothing new, the strange humor that’s a feature of Liquid Death’s brand mashups certainly stands out. To understand what goes into partnering with Liquid Death, Marketing Brew caught up with Murphy to get a sense of the process.
“They see us a bit like a Saturday Night Live stage,” according to Murphy, who said that he has some 73 brands interested in partnering currently in his inbox. “We’re going to go into the Liquid Death world,” Murphy said of the reasoning he sees, “and we’re going to get exposed to this new audience.”
Linking up
For interested brands, Liquid Death has a big stage to offer. Since its founding in 2018, the brand has built a dedicated fanbase on social media, with 7 million followers on TikTok and 7.3 million followers on Instagram. Murphy says the brand regularly earns more than a billion media impressions each month, all while keeping costs relatively low.
“We’re very much an influencer,” Murphy said. “We ended [2024 with] over 30 billion [earned media impressions], and that was on a spend of—I’m talking every production dollar, every talent fee, because we work with celebrities too—that was under $2 million.”
While the details of each brand partnership deal vary, Liquid Death’s typical arrangement when partnering with a brand is to contribute whatever creative that its five-person, in-house team lands on. The company generally asks that its brand partner cover “hard costs” of production, as well as the marketing budget and media resources that could include anything from influencer spend or light paid spend behind the campaign, Murphy said.
When considering partners, the most important factor is if the brand looking to link up is “aligned with our creative sensibilities,” Murphy said.
That likeminded spirit was what attracted Sheetz, a convenience store brand that operates its own irreverent social presence, to promote its recent partnership with Liquid Death, Ryan Sheetz, executive vice president of marketing and supply chain at Sheetz, told Marketing Brew.
“We have a lot in common, right? Both very bold brands, both very high energy brands, but both brands who really like to have a lot of fun,” Sheetz said.
Slash and burn
For one day in late July, the brands offered Sheetz customers a new, if unconventional, way to slice their sandwiches: with a chainsaw. And no, it wasn’t just a lark just for social media; some 150 patrons in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, got to see their sandwiches chainsawed in half.
The whole endeavor required an unconventional setup.
“It took a lot of preparation and planning to make sure our store teams were well set up and we had all the proper safety and organizational measures in place,” Sheetz said. “We had a brand-new kind of food-safe blade that was put on the chainsaw, and we used food-grade lubricant instead of petroleum-based oil. I learned a lot about chainsaws that I never thought I would need to know.”
Jeremy Ekes, VP client strategy and services at January Digital, said Liquid Death’s built a reputation for unique partnerships where marketers are willing to take a leap, making its particular creative sensibility stand out in a landscape where co-branding is all the rage.
“Generally, there’s probably few and far between in the industry,” Ekes said. “Probably a handful of brands you can think of that have the right to own that space, Liquid Death being one of them.”
Brand education
Those kinds of out-of-the-box partnerships and unexpected creative aren’t solely for entertainment. Through all of its partnerships, Liquid Death is aiming to continue to boost its brand awareness—while educating consumers about what the brand offers, especially as its product lineup expands.
“We are talking more about product benefits than we have ever before,” Murphy said. “I think we found we had this great awareness number, and especially being a young company, but at least a third of those people still thought we were a beer or maybe an energy drink, so we had to work a little harder to make sure that message comes through.”
This report was originally published by Marketing Brew.
