There is a growing cultural appetite for anti-marketing and brands that do not take themselves seriously, especially among younger, cynical audiences.

Liquid Death has a product that is literally just water but packaged in a tallboy can with aggressive, metal-inspired branding.

Customers want to stay hydrated but find traditional water marketing boring and lifestyle marketing often feels fake or overly polished.

The water category is obsessed with purity, soft blue aesthetics, and wellness tropes that feel increasingly clinical and soulless.

Let the product clash with something unexpected to create friction and humour.

Look at where your product usually lives. If it’s water, it’s the gym or a hike. If it’s software, it’s a sterile office. This is your baseline for boredom. You need to know the 'right' place so you can avoid it like the plague. Your goal is to find the exact opposite of this environment to prepare for the upcoming collision.

Identify your product's most boringly obvious setting

Pick a world with its own rigid rules, like a heavy metal concert, a high-society gala, or a kid's birthday party. The more established the 'vibe' of this world, the better. You want a setting that has a specific visual language that your product will eventually violate. Liquid Death chose the rowdy party scene because it’s the ultimate antithesis of 'pure' bottled water.

Find a high-stakes, conflicting cultural sandbox

Place your product in that conflicting world without changing the product’s identity. The product must remain itself while the world reacts to it—or better yet, the world treats the product as if it perfectly belongs. This creates the 'glitch in the matrix' effect. When kids chug Liquid Death like it's cheap lager, the tension is born from that specific, uncomfortable visual overlap.

Force the product into the wrong scene

Don't explain the joke. The power of this strategy is in the viewer’s confusion. If you highlight the 'clash' too much with voiceover or text, you kill the tension. Let the audience do the mental work of realizing that the 'beer' is actually water. That moment of realization is where the brand stickiness happens. Trust your audience to be smart enough to get it.

Lean into the resulting cognitive dissonance

Go all in on the execution. If you’re doing a parody of a beer commercial with water, use the same cameras, the same lighting, and the same aggressive editing. Half-assing the contrast results in a confusing mess rather than a strategic masterpiece. The tension only works if the 'wrong' world feels 100% authentic. If it looks like a fake ad, the friction disappears instantly.

Commit to the bit until it hurts

Stop Playing It Safe and Start a Fight

Learn how to use the 'Create a Tension Between Product & World' strategy to build friction, humor, and brand recall. See how Liquid Death mastered the clash.