• by Les Luchter , July 15, 2024

Liquid I.V., one of the five top-selling brands during last year’s Amazon Prime Day, has teamed with the retail giant’s Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab in support of this year’s event, taking place Tuesday and Wednesday.

In advance of Prime Day, the powdered drink hydration brand has staged a “takeover” of 2 million Amazon boxes being delivered to consumers. The boxes tease both a special brand offer as well as Prime Day itself, Aaron Jones, Liquid I.V.’s vice president, ecommerce and media, tells Marketing Daily.

Other advance Prime Day promotion from Liquid I.V. includes live streamers teasing that a special deal will be dropping, social media teasing, and an Amazon “home page share-of-voice takeover.”

Come Tuesday, Liquid I.V. launches its Prime Day offer: 30% off everything, plus an exclusive product for the platform: the first variety pack of Hydration Multiplier Sugar-Free, last summer’s big Liquid I.V. hit.

Running at least through August, this marks the first time Liquid I.V. has offered an Amazon exclusive. “No better time than now for trying it out,” says Jones.

During Prime Day itself, Liquid I.V.’s “360 activation” will include Amazon homepage placements and much more, Jones says. “The majority of our channels will start focusing on how we can drive people’s awareness to this platform. All of our off-platform media will drive there. We’ll have social creators going live, influencers going live. We will showcase this in our own channels like email, SMS. We’ll even have some upper funnel messages going live.”

One aspect to be featured will be the brand’s recent -- and until now, fairly secret -- tie-in with the retailer’s Prime Air drone delivery service. A month ago, Liquid I.V. became “the first CPG product to launch through a drone delivery mechanism with Amazon,” Jones explains.

“This came to us as an idea from Amazon,” says Jones. “It was hard to say no.”

The stunt involved surprise deliveries of the new Sugar-Free pack to a “handful” of people.

On Prime Day, “We will have multiple 360 efforts to show some of the authentic reactions of people getting surprised…with a new product that we’re bringing to market,” Jones says.

Last July, without much lead-up promotion, Liquid I.V. was the top seller of any brand on day one of Prime Day, Jones notes, before ending up as a top-seller for the entire event, leading Amazon to want “to work with us to see what we can do to make it even bigger this year.”

“Amazon batteries were up there” in the top sellers, he notes, so ”for Liquid I.V. to be associated with a household staple like that really shows the magnitude of where this brand has landed.”

One of the reasons Liquid I.V. is so up on Prime Day, Jones adds, is that “not only is it a big shopping day within the U.S., but it’s also a big discovery day for brands.”

Over half the people who purchased Liquid I.V. last Prime Day hadn’t bought the product on Amazon within previous 12 months, he points out, noting that Prime Day is “a great time to drive household penetration, brand awareness and get in front of new customers.”