Ep#8: The Power of Brand for Startups with Danish Chan

Welcome to Method, where we decode what it really takes to build and scale startups. I'm Andy Walsh, founder and strategist. Each week we'll bring you actionable insights and real stories. Let's dive in. Welcome back to Startups Decoded. It's a podcast where we look at all things startups and of course we bring in experts. And today, really excited to look into the world of brand strategy, which is one of my personal passions. And my guest today is Danish Chan, a founder from Untangled. I'll let him talk a bit more about himself. But really important conversation today for startups on brand strategy. Danish, welcome.

Thank you. Great to be here, Andy.

Thank you, sir. And it's been a while since we've had a conversation, but just before we jumped on now, just talking about life and changes, what's going on. And you're in Melbourne, Australia. I'm in New York at the moment, enjoying some cold weather and snow outside, which is beautiful. Cool. I'm guessing you're in peak summer in Melbourne.

Yeah, it's. We just have been through a heat wave, so like 38, 39 Celsius consistently and now I think it's going to dip into autumn. So I look at the snow behind you and I go, yeah, I kind of don't miss the snow too much. I'm enjoying the sun.

Yeah, it's beautiful. And for those of you playing at home, 38, 39 Celsius is tipping close to 100 Fahrenheit. So pretty hot.

Pretty hot.

So Danish, first and foremost, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about Untangled, your strategy business.

Yeah, absolutely. So we started Untangled five years ago. We actually just celebrated our five year anniversary and we designed it to be a strategy studio. We only do strategy, everything from data science to research, customer brand strategy, experience strategy and everything in between. And we designed the studio to be the perfect partner to a modern CMO. We came across so many CMOs who were just inundated by all their agencies and all their consultants telling them different things. They're going, this is your media strategy, this is your advertising strategy. And nothing really stitching it together and actually it being quite a traditional mindset about a bottom up approach. Actually what they needed was this end to end point of view on how do you win and how do you win through the lens of customer. And so that's what we made. So we have offices in Melbourne, in Sydney and in London and we serve everything from startups and scale ups, working with founders to Create businesses that from day dot to scale, and we work with massive enterprise businesses from big banks to Prime Video out of the US to Carlsberg to Aviva in the uk. And we see the importance of strategy at every level of business throughout the C suite. And it's really fantastic, amazing.

For me, your plugin, in a very pure sense, helping brands define who they are. So I think for me, what I'd love to hear for people that are founders and may not know the full depth and breadth of brand strategy in your mind today, how would you define brand strategy?

Maybe I'll take a step back and talk about how we think about brand. So for a long time, brand was thought of as a communication device. It's the thing that you put onto your package, your product, your advertising that identified who you were. I think as we've evolved in our thinking, brand is an organizing system for the business. So we think about brand and brand strategy as what that thing that connects our commercial ambition, how do we grow as a business? The cultural ambition, which is why do people want to work with us, our staff, our recruits, our partners, what's the thing that unites us culturally? And then what do we want to be famous for in market? And ideally, the brand is the thing that connects all three of those things that helps us think about brand. Like, think about it with the capital B. It's the thing that then helps us decide who do we hire, how do we think about the products we make, the experiences we create, and how do we advertise and communicate and use the tone of voice that we have. Like, it connects all the pieces. And that's the glue of the business. That's the thing that connects departments and people and products and engineering and systems all together.

Yeah. And I think within that, I love that, because what you're creating is objectivity. Not everyone is an expert on brand, from, like, look and feel, tone of voice to core values, purpose, et cetera, everything that runs out off the back of the work that you're doing. So having a way to make it universal for everyone, to be able to understand it 100% and make sure that that's their filter for how they think. And for me, the evolution I've seen, and I think we'll touch on this a bit more, is that in the last 10 years, the way that a brand is becoming more human in the sense of how you define what a brand is and the role that it plays. It's. To your point, back in the day, it would have been used probably just to inform look and feel and maybe tone of voice. And that's definitely evolved a lot more now as companies shift a lot towards purpose driven businesses and having depth to their, to what they actually do beyond the product that they sell.

Absolutely, man. I think maybe there's two things, right, especially for founder led like startups, the founder is so intrinsically linked to, to the business and the brand that often part of the process we go through is how do you codify the most important parts of the founder DNA into the brand and the business? Because what we find especially at scale up stage is the best ideas tend to have that little magic dust that the founder always had through the business because it kind of feels the most authentic to the brand. How do you codify that? How do you make it so if that founder isn't in the room, there's still that cultural essence of what they want the business to be, to be there. So I think there's like something really interesting to that and maybe what that actually turns into is that strategy isn't a PDF. Like so often you'll go and go what's your strategy? And they'll bring up like a deck and like a document and go oh, this is what we do. That's not a strategy, that's like the, the artifact. Maybe strategy's cultural. You like, you walk through Google and it was like this interesting thing. I hadn't seen it before, but people say oh that's not very googly and you kind of go, oh, that the brand living through culture and they know what is on and off brand in the way they behave and they didn't need a PDF to tell them that's true. That that's the, I guess the evolution of brand strategy, especially in like fast moving organizations.

Yeah, that's, that's great. And I, I've used the word sometimes love letter as what a brand strategy is because a love letter typically has a lot of vulnerability in the sense of like, this is me, this is who I want to be, this is you, this is what I like about you and this is what I want us to be together. And like that applies to lots of different facets. Right. And I think as far as being vulnerable in that situation, you touched on it there, which I'd love to sort of pick up on, is around the founder. And in episode, I think number four for us we had Cindy Scalicki and her expertise is an executive coach and helping founders actually turn their technical product into a story that they could articulate consistently. So in that situation you're Merging brand purpose and brand values, but also individual sort of context as far as where you came from, what you're passionate about, and how you have this central narrative that you feel confident to be able to articulate.

Yeah, I think maybe it's two parts. Like, it's not. It's not taking a hundred percent of the founder. If you do that, you're not creating a brand, you're creating a personal brand in some ways. And that's kind of like a broken system because the. You've become handicapped by always having to have that person represent the business, and that's not scalable. What you want to do is take the parts of their personality, the DNA that they've injected into the business that's inseparable. And how do you codify that? And eventually what you want to be able to do is separate the two, you know, to be. Have this idea of. I'll use an example, like there's Richard Branson and there's Virgin, and there's definitely parts which are. Which are interlinked. There's absolutely part of the Virgin which have nothing to do with Richard. And understanding the. Like that mix in the Venn diagram, where what is and isn't is really important. And that's not a simple thing to do. That's something you grow in.

Yeah. And I've been there as a founder myself, and it ended up for us as our company. We had two very distinct businesses under one umbrella and wrestled with the right articulation of what that business stood for. As far as, like, from a value perspective, it was exactly the same from an outcome. As far as our product in each, they were in different lanes. And we ended up splitting the company in two to be able to be really specific and make it as simple for our target audience as possible. And that was a big decision, of course, But I think we realized that you've got to be able to be really native and natural in the way that you talk about things, but also how you articulate it from a structured marketing perspective.

Absolutely. And then, you know, there's the third part of the equation, first being founder, second being product and market, the third being customer. Like, what do they expect and what do they want and what's. What's the motivation you're tapping into and understanding? Actually, it's the combination of who you are, what you do and who you serve that gets us to that really interesting sweet spot of going, maybe we've got something different here.

Yeah. And I love that too, because what I see, we've had Consistently now with a few different guests. Talk about three phases of a startup and that that first stage being growth hacking, where your employees don't really have much structure, they're just testing learning on an active basis every day. Second stage being where you start to then build some process based upon learnings. And the third stage is that you're sort of executing based upon real data from process that's been built previously. And I think for me with what you're talking about there, those three stages come to life in different ways from a brand strategy point of view. So what I'd love to be able to do within that first stage there for a startup, they're thinking about building a brand strategy. If they're pre revenue, maybe they're about to launch. Like are there any foundational things that you would recommend that they potentially put in place in that first day? Just test and learn a little bit. Maybe set a bit of a North Star that they work towards, but understand that that will evolve as they start to get early customers.

Yeah, I mean I think you hit the nail on the head with the last little bit there, which is evolution, like there is so important that we don't think we're carving things into stone like what you have in day one, similar to products, similar to the way we structure and organize our business doesn't necessarily mean that's what it is in year two, year three, year five, year ten. I think at the very beginning maybe my advice is always what, what, what makes us interesting as a business and how do we then turn that into something that a framework for consistency and those two things compelling and consistent at the very beginning at least it gives us a very high level framework to move fast. If you're rethinking everything from scratch every time, that's really slow and that's like maybe one of the things which you don't have time for. One of the observations we've garnered through working with lots of founders in early stage is that all their energy, all their investment, all their time is in product process and size, which it should be because that's, you know, the heart of your business and product tends to be brand. For a lot of businesses, at the very start, it's the thing that you're selling. I think knowing the, to your point, your purpose to understanding your positioning, why you win, what makes us as a product, as a brand better, more interesting, more relevant, more valuable than anybody else in market. And articulating that in a really interesting way from day dot is really powerful because it means that Even if we pivot and you change the product, how to evolve it, or you want to add a new thing because you realize that actually the core product's really interesting, but there's accessories or tangential things that you want to add to it, which makes it better. You have flexibility because you're not built on a product. You're built on a belief system that is compelling and consistent, and then you can expand really quickly with that. You're not starting from scratch every time. So that's maybe my advice, which is have a framework which is, what are we? Why are we important? Why are we valuable? And then how do we articulate that and then move fast.

Yeah, that's good advice. And I would say the same thing in the conversations I have that first part. You don't want to overthink it, but at least you want to be consistent. Because if you reinvent the wheel every time you're doing some kind of communication, it's going to be such a time drain. But it also dilutes the value of that message. Right. Repetition from a human perspective is critical for people to understand your brand, particularly if you're a startup that's creating a new category, too. And with the evolution of AI and the type of businesses we're seeing now, we're seeing not only just new businesses, but new categories where you actually have to, in parallel, educate on what you're doing, but also who your business is. So those two things are complicated. If you have to do both, there's a lot of considerations now as far as a modern brand. So I love that framework. So the second stage in that if you're making revenue, you're at a point where you've got retention and you're getting product market fit. Is that the point where you would start to think about, okay, we've learned a lot, we've got some data, we've got customer feedback. Like, what stage would you recommend to a startup founder within that journey that they start to get something a little more formal and a bit more rigorous?

I think always be like, oh, that's a really tricky one, because I'm a big fan that you can all. You can be rigorous from day one. It doesn't mean you can't be fast or you can't be fluid. Rigorous means from day one, you looked at the category, you looked at your competitive set, you looked at your customer and go, we think this is it. It's not, you know, a gut decision, it's an educated decision based on that. Maybe as you scale and you're starting to generate a little bit of revenue. The question then becomes, how do we turn a brand from a belief structure into a business growth platform? And so the question then becomes, okay, we want to scale who's our customer? Disproportionate value. Who are we going to grow with if we know that we're going to grow with a certain segment, a certain type of customer understanding how does that brand, how do we develop a brand that speaks to that customer specifically? To grow is the next kind of like stage of scale up. It's the idea of the value of your business is essentially proxy of how many customers are there for your business to capture and how much are they willing to spend on you. So that's the power of your brand, which is what's the ability of that brand to capture their attention, their affection, Start that way. I think the scale up stage is very much now you're fitting a brand to capture as many people as you can and create value.

Yeah. And building on that, I love. I've read a few case studies in the last year or two and one of them was McDonald's and it stuck in my mind obviously globally, probably the most well known brands in the world. Yet for them, they still have four verticals they work in. So brand is one. So it's that aspirational kind of piece to put them front of mind when you're considering they do product, so building equity in the product range that they have to get people to go, you know, whether it's nostalgia, whether it's something they want to try. Third one is price. So it's driving people to go and trial things or revisit again. And then the fourth one is specialty, which is just random ranges, et cetera. But for me I look at that and even a global brand as well known as McDonald's is still spending a lot of money on brand and brand storytelling as well as the product and side by side. So my question for that for you, I think people quite often get confused in startups about brand and product messaging. And once you start to get retained customers, you need to be able to have both side by side. So like what, what are the key differences between sort of brand messaging and product messaging?

Really good question, man. Okay. It's really simple framework. Like I love this podcast because we talk about like actual insights and like untangles very much for actual insights. So in that vein, the this is old but very useful tool in brand strategy, which is the benefit side. And so you sit down, you kind of go, okay, what's the functional benefit of my product or my brand? What's the rational benefit? And then what's the emotional benefit? Very typically, the functional and rational benefit of a product. Let's take Gatorade, for example. Increases electrolytes, helps you run faster, right? Last longer, whatever it might be, their product messages, we get to a point of, okay, what's the emotional benefit of this product? You know, the idea that you could be like Mike, very old reference, but you get the point, right? This idea that you, with this, you have the potential to be a elite athlete and like every other superstar that you've ever dreamed of being like, it's the elevation point that is the difference between where the product starts and stops and what the brand makes you feel. It's the emotional equity that, if done right, is hard to copy. You know, that's the thing where absolute. I couldn't tell you what power it is, right. I couldn't tell you what Lucas Aid is. Although they had amazing ads at some stage, I think there comes to a point where all three associate as sports strength. I know the brand of Gatorade, and I know because they've tapped into an emotional equity of my aspiration and what I feel like I want to achieve in life, not just what the product does. Understanding the functional, the rational, and then the emotional helps us then go, okay, what is the product? What's the product messaging? Why do I choose this? And what. How do I. Why am I willing to pay more for it or buy it more often? Is the brand.

Yeah, and the emotional part is critical. And in a world of AI where all the news you read at the moment within young startups is the ability to build a product quickly and very cost effectively for what would have taken two years, some businesses are doing in two months to be able to have something live. But what that means is you sort of dilute the unique value of the people that you have around the table. So building a moat to defend your business is getting harder. So you could have, what, in a category, 10 competitors now? Maybe 50 competitors in the category. And within that, it's like, how do you differentiate yourself? So as human beings, we have an emotional connection with people in our lives. It's part of who we are. And emotions are programmed responses that we have as part of our DNA that we've learned. And if you're able to invoke those in a way, you connect at a level that's beyond the functional message that you can do within a product. For me, I think today and in the next coming years, having that emotional connection at a brand level is going to be the most important thing, almost beyond product messaging.

I mean, you know, the. The cliche example everybody loves to use is Liquid death, right? Because it's. It's water. And for 50 years, water was sold in purity. Evian, you know, whatever it might be. This idea that it's easy to replicate a product like that, let's be honest. And another brand could go, we're going to have mountain water in a can that's sustainable. Here you go. The difference is, and I think, I hope I'm right, I'm sure that people will correct me if I'm wrong, is that that was a brand first startup. They had the pitch deck before they had the product. And I think maybe part of that is the belief and attitude that actually, what if water was punk? And what if you sold it like you do rock and roll and heavy metal, not like you do purity? Because, number one, again, you find a unique positioning that's emotional, that people feel very excited and comfortable about. Drinking that in a bar, that is hard to replicate. If done well, you can replicate the water in a can that's sustainable from it. You know, that's easy. Everyone could do that tomorrow if they wanted to. I'm sure building a brand that has that aspirational, emotional connection that you can. And them going, oh, we're a hydration business, so they can do sports drinks like that, they can do whatever they like, means that they're not stuck in water, they're not a product, they're a brand. That then they can very quickly diversify, pivot, change, understand there's new opportunities. That's the power of brand very early on.

Yeah. And I use that case study a lot. I think it's a really great example of looking at the market and going like, if you went to a Whole Foods and looked at the diversity of brands in the seltzer range, there's so many. But if you look at the color palette, they're all quite feminine in the way that they look as far as they're meant to look light and freshen and healthy compared to a traditional soda. Right. So it's a very specific brand design to invoke a certain image to a target audience, which is a female skew. So basically to. To get the same product, package it up in something that's a bigger size, masculine name, masculine colors, masculine ads for a male audience to go in and say, yeah, I'm going to buy that. They're not necessarily choosing the product because there's probably a hundred different choices they could get in the same thing. They're buying into the brand, as you say. So it has a much larger impact and I think a greater effect on loyalty as well.

Yeah, I think like you could, you could feel like once you agree and formalize a brand very early on, it could be limiting because you're committing to something like you're committing to that love letter. Right. You're committing very early to your promise. And that can feel like it's a trap. But I said it the other way around, which is if you know what you stand for and what you love and who you serve, you can evolve, change, adapt and pivot the product way to market how you sell easier because you've got the foundation. And maybe for founders and startups, having a really strong foundation is more important than nailing product because I don't know. And we speak to a lot of founders and it's this interesting thing which is price has to change and evolve very quickly. Understanding your belief system and your organizing system for the business is a, it's a freeing aspect for a lot of founders because you're not making that decision, you said it before, you're not making that decision every day that's been decided. So you can focus on the other things.

Yeah, it's a superpower. And I have this debate all the time and there's companies out there and I assume you would know Tracksuit who start up out of New Zealand, have expanded into the us, the uk, Australia, and they're doing really well. And their whole thesis is based around the power of brand and being able to measure and record that. Because for the people who are doing the accounting within a company, they can look at programmatic ads and performance based buys and they can see that there's a direct correlation. We spend X and it drives high value from a revenue point of view. But brand feels a little bit more intangible as far as we spend this much money on brand. But how do we measure that? And tracksuit do a great job. I've been able to demonstrate within that that return. And McDonald's going back to that same example, they did research and I feel like within the 12 or 18 months they, they determined that if they stopped spending on brand, there'd be a decline in sales because it's, it's very, it's that emotional piece. Right. You want to be able to relate to something like you'd relate to a human. And I think for me that speaks volumes. And they're A global brand, as I said before, that have such high repetition and high recall with everything that they're doing. So going back to your point around the power of brand, I would love to go back into the start. You talked about brand fame. Like, brand fame is something that separates you from the crowd beyond what your product is. Are there any sort of examples that you've worked on directly where you've seen a noticeable shift in brand fame from some of the work that you've done?

Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because across marketing departments, everywhere, and I mean everywhere, the thing we measure is awareness, consideration, choice, and understand the health of fun. And that's really important. Like, and I recommend that to every brand, like understanding your brand health because it's a diagnostic tool. It helps make decisions from day diet about where do we invest and how do we go about it. Brand names a little bit different. Like to your. Let's use Macca's, because. And Australians call it Maccas. It's McDonald's. The McDonald's as a really good example, which is they would probably have, I'm assuming, 100% brand of you. Ask them. Everybody, everybody knows McDonald's, right? The question then becomes, would you consider it? There's probably some people who go, you know what, it's fast food. I really don't want to eat that. Versus some people go, I want it every day. And a spectrum between fame is different. Fame is asking, how do you gain an unfair share of the conversation? Fame is about relevance and cultural equity as much as it is about being able to advertise and be known by everybody. Because just because you're known doesn't mean you're liked. And just because you're like doesn't mean you're relevant. And if you're relevant doesn't mean you're valuable. There's a difference. And fame isn't the cure for everything. And I think, you know, modern culture will tell you fame is as much toxic as it is helpful. What it does do is a shortcut. It forces us to think about how do we enter the zeitgeist of people's conversations. How do we get people talking about us more than they probably should? The idea that Netflix. Good example, right? They. The whole idea that you would say, what are you watching on Netflix? Netflix and chill. The idea of being. Having the content that everyone's talking about the next day is faith. It's not that everybody has Netflix or knows who they are. It's about being in a conversation everywhere, from pubs to bars to cafes to Boardrooms. That's the power of if you distill and communicate your brand in the right way, that that's the shortcut to effectiveness.

Yeah. And I love, love oatly as a brand for doing that. If you think about their story, I mean, it's oat milk. There's nothing very sexy or appealing about oat milk. It's just, it's a non dairy alternative for people that are looking for that for either health reasons or maybe it's a choice from being vegan, things that people are actively choosing. But what Oakley did really elegantly was flip their whole brand strategy and creative storytelling and like became like provocative in a way. I think that some of the like paraphrasing, but their line was anchored around milk made for humans, implying that cow's milk was for cows and not for humans. And within that, like they were able to get probably an unfair share of voice in conversation for people that even didn't care whether they drank oat milk or not. But they got brand fame. And then when you're choosing, it feels like that. Okay, this is the only one that I know of because they're famous beyond what they do with marketing.

Absolutely. So a friend of mine used to be the creative director there, Kev, and he famously, he says, like, we didn't really have a strategy, we had an attitude. And that quickly became the thing that separated us from everybody else because nobody had a point of view, personality, attitude in market. And that alone became a competitive advantage. And their irreverence about the role and the importance of milk, especially oat milk, had in people's lives and oat milk advertising had in people's lives was refreshing. And that refreshingness is often enough to then go, okay, that's a point of view on our role in people's lives and in the market. And that's a belief system. You know, they, I can't remember and I've seen a lot of oatly ads. Them talk about why their product is better than every other product, that it's pure, that they use more oat or they milk oats differently. However they do it. I don't know how they do it, but they doesn't. That that's not why you choose oatly. That's not why they can ask a premium. They do it because they're core, because they understand their role in the culture and the market and in shelves and they kind of lean into it and they have fun with it, you know, and you don't have to love their work like let's talk from an advertising perspective. Like, I remember that super bowl ad where it was the CEO playing like a keyboard and it was like everyone really trolled it. It was like really, you know, that like the irreverence and the zag to what everybody else is doing for super bowl and for advertising and trying to oversell it was true to them and it built their brand for exactly who they wanted to be. And that's probably more important than anything else. I mean, and sales. But that from a cultural perspective is really good.

Yeah. And I feel like from memory too, that ad got banned. I don't know if it was in Europe. It was somewhere. It got banned originally, then they re released it maybe for the Super Bowl. I don't recall the history, but it's that kind of conversation. Right. You gotta be careful on pushing legal boundaries. But as far as having something that is. Has like those punk instincts in a way, in a category which is quite vanilla as far as what it is for me is a great thing to think about and probably a great way to end our show. We're at time, which is a real shame because we could do this all afternoon. It's been such a treat. But to leave us today. Danish, I'd love to hear from you about Untangled and how do people reach out to you and what type of projects are you doing?

Yeah. Thank you. So Untangled is a international business. We work with clients across the. Across the US across Europe and across apac. Everything from transformational projects we'll get. Businesses come to us and they'll go, we want to double the size of the business in three years or we think we've hit our ceiling in terms of the market, the product, how do we grow? Are there people out there that we should be serving and we don't know. And so we'll do everything from research. And how do we turn that research into a strategic advantage that you can action within the business through your internal team or through your partners, whether it be ad agencies, trade like design agencies, innovation agencies, and we're the glue that go. Okay, how do you connect evidence and data across different worlds of like your database to surveys and everything in between to something that's really simple and really actionable and really compelling. This is a terrible thing, but this is maybe the easiest way is imagine if Fast Company had a business consultancy. We kind of imagine ourselves like that. And you can reach out on LinkedIn, pretty responsive and. Or go to our website and there's. There's a contact us there and we'll absolutely reply and just ask us a question and we'll love to answer it.

Perfect. And I'll of course share details in show notes and when this episode goes live, I'll share details for Danish and untangled Danish. It's been a treat. Thank you so much for joining us, sir.

My pleasure. Thank you.

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