Friday Frivolity: Liquid Death Tries to Top Pepsi with Its Own Jet Gimmick

Liquid Death is an interesting case of the self-aware, self-indulgent, post-modern marketing scheme. Stage one of marketing is to try to conflate in the mind of the audience appearance and reality. Post-modernism, among other things, questions whether we are really capable of distinguishing appearance and reality. See recent Presidential campaigns. Stage two of marketing embraces both phase one and insights drawn from post-modernism.  Advertisers now say, yes, we're lying to you, but we both know you can't distinguish appearances from reality, so why not buy something that appears flashy but we both know is actually nothing special, and we'll both have a good laugh because we are taking your money but you know that we are taking your money based on pure puffery? If you prefer, we can make it a non-fungible token.

Enter Liquid Death. "Don't Be Scared" the marketers tell us.  "It's just water.  And iced tea." But we've marketed it in such a way that you will think it is edgy and pay more for it. Not only that, but we've put it in aluminum cans, which are eco-friendly, because the only thing young people enjoy more than being edgy is being environmentally-aware and edgy.

But if you really want to reduce your carbon footprint, what you need is your own jet.  Sure beats the bus.

Despite Liquid Death's protestations that this is all very real, it seems to just look real.  The details of how it works are here. Winning this contest would get very expensive very quickly, as the rules note:

The winner is solely responsible for all costs and expenses associated with shipping, insuring, storing (e.g., in a hangar, except as set forth in Section 6 above), maintaining, and handling the Jet, all required Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) certification(s), permits, licenses and any other legally-required permissions, consents and/or documentation, as well as any and all federal, state, and local taxes, if any, that apply to the Prize (whether the Jet Prize or the Cash Prize, as applicable based on what the winner elected to receive).

But the winner has the option of taking cash ($257,000) instead of the jet.  The winner is to be announced on September 20th, at an event that promises to be very flashy. 

Don't be fooled by appearances. It is highly unlikely that anybody is going to take the jet, at least not as anything other than an investment that they can flip before they incur significant costs. Or you can just join in the fun, buy some Liquid Death, and murder your thirst.