Can you catch lightning in a can TWICE?

Spawned from Liquid Death’s highly valued ($700 million last we checked) canned water business, the brand’s new canned iced tea launch is its first real product extension outside of water.?

Liquid Death is an incredible case study in branding. Take a commodity product, dress it up with unique branding elements, and—boom!—suddenly it’s cool to consume. Liquid Death performed a consumer zeitgeist trifecta: 1) health and wellness: people want less sugar and alcohol; 2) sustainability: aluminum is far easier to recycle than plastic bottles 3) skulls: the motif was everywhere when LD first appeared.?

How do you keep the Liquid Death party going? Is iced tea on brand? Is iced tea a better idea than iced coffee?

And what about the brand itself? Does it risk getting tired? Is iced tea an opportunity to introduce a sibling brand?

Here are three questions we would answer with testing before we developed an iced tea product.

1. Could innovation for this brand be on the outside, not just the inside? Think new designs, limited edition cans,or? artist-inspired designs that command a bigger premium?
2. If innovation is on the inside, what’s the right move:? iced tea, caffeinated water, extra-hydrating water?
3. Is there a bigger play by creating a sibling brand? What about refillables?

Let’s say you’re a Liquid Death fan. What if you saw an ad for a refillable in your Instagram feed? Maybe it’s called “Deathless,” but it shares LD’s design heritage and it stops you in your tracks. The ad says the product is in development, but you can sign up to learn more. Would you click?

If you do, that’s data about consumer interest in a new concept. And if you sign up on the landing page to learn more, that’s even more data.?

Now, imagine ads that represent all three strategic questions, targeted at LD audiences and some non-LD audiences. Think of how much you could learn about what potential customers really want!

Heat-testing derisks new product extensions. It's fast. It's behavioral and yields quantitative data. And it might have identified an easier-to-execute and more profitable innovation strategy for the canned water brand.