Last summer, a new beverage brand hit the market. Accompanying the product release was a two-minute promotional video with some eye-catching details: a man in a skull mask cracking open a cold one to some death metal, a bikini-clad woman emerging from a lagoon in front of an industrial plant, and some seemingly intoxicated shenanigans in a kiddie pool. But the commercial wasn’t advertising beer, or liquor, or even hard seltzer. It was a campaign for Bloody Water, a canned water brand.
Perhaps more surprising than the Bloody Water ad is the fact that its unhinged marketing has become commonplace amongst the new but growing segment of canned water. Plenty of other brands—including Liquid Death and its legions of unaffiliated spin-offs, and other companies like Not Beer and Natural Spirit—are leaning into a gritty, alcohol-inspired aesthetic to grab consumers’ attention. Over the past several months, water startups have been embracing everything from tallboy cans to sexy promotional materials to retro Americana-inspired branding.
These converging trends leads us to an inevitable and important question: What the hell is happening to water?
Revisiting the Wild West of canned water
The gritty new era of water might seem like a wild pivot from water’s health-conscious branding of the recent past, but the water-sphere has actually been primed for disruption for several years. Andrea Hernández, author of the food and beverage trends newsletter Snaxshot, has studied the past few decades of the bottled and canned water business. She says that context for this latest branding fad can be traced back to the 1980s, when LaCroix first hit the scene and snagged customers from upscale sparkling water brands like Perrier.
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