A student case study of Liquid Death credits bold humor, shock, niche targeting and social sharing for the brand’s attention and loyalty on a small budget

Experimental

Reader Note:: This is the authors’ interpretation from a qualitative case study of one brand, Liquid Death, published as a student paper in the ICFTBA 2025 Symposium proceedings. The only measured data in the study are YouTube view and comment counts and sentiment coding of 50 comments per ad. The paper does not test which tactic caused the result, and it does not say when the data was collected.
Evidence:: Expert judgment
Vendor interest:: None
Sample:: Single-brand qualitative case study of Liquid Death; YouTube ad view and comment counts plus 50 sampled comments from each advertisement, compared with selected Coca-Cola ads.

Good for

Getting a rough orientation, and deciding what to check yourself.

Anything that needs a measurement. Nobody counted or tested this.
The source never says when this data was collected. It could be considerably older than the publication date suggests.
This is one case — one company, one campaign, one account. Nothing implies it happens anywhere else.
The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

One-off public stunts like flash mobs were tied more to brand attitude (0.33) than to purchase intent (0.21)

0.42

standardized effect of guerilla ambient marketing on customer purchase intention among 344 mall shoppers in Jeddah in May 2023

An offer in the subject line makes 77% of B2B prospects more likely to open a cold email, while shocking subject lines put off 32%

Cold email subject line type and likelihood to open
Subject line type	% More likely to open	Makes no difference (%)
An offer	77%	14%
Personalised (name/company name)	71%	22%
A question	69%	19%
Intriguing/mystery	64%	22%
Topical/trend/current affairs	64%	26%

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

Unusual ambient ads and one-off stunts were both tied to higher purchase intent and better brand attitude

52.5%

Lift in lead rate for cold emails that promise a fast, near-term result — the strongest-performing message pattern tested

45.7%

Difference in lead rate between cold emails that open by naming a problem and those that don't — problem-led openers convert worse