Liquid Death's secret to viral marketing: Hire comedians

Liquid Death is masterful at going viral. But the man leading its marketing team doesn't like it described as such.

"I hate the word viral," said Dan Murphy, svp of marketing at the canned beverage brand Liquid Death. In his mind, it's not precise enough.

Liquid Death, by all accounts, is a viral product. Its very concept is meant to make people laugh and share. The company is best known for its canned water products that appear like beer cans. And as it gained prominence, the viral campaigns continued -- most recently, for example, Liquid Death ran a giveaway offering a lucky customer a fighter jet.

But what Murphy was focused on wasn't virality but eliciting an organic response. "We needed people to walk down the beverage aisle and see a thing and stop," he said.

Murphy spoke at last week's Modern Retail Marketing Summit and dove into how the brand approaches its campaigns and is so successful at getting people to engage with it. This week's Modern Retail Podcast is a live recording of the conversation. He shared many tips of the trade. For one, he said, "we're entirely in-house."

The other part that's so important, Murphy said, was to hire people in comedy to create comedic campaigns.

"We don't have people with traditional marketing backgrounds in the creative group," he said. "It's people that are Adult Swim writers and wrote for movies and wrote for The Onion."