Can a Rebrand Really Double Your Sales?

just go and do it and see what happens. Ideas are worth like jack Absolute jack Like if you can't execute, there's nothing. Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes with it. Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it. Love it. Wrap your arms around it and and say it out loud. New Zealanders don't know any better. They will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest. hope is to dream that ultimate dream. Like what is it that you ultimately want to do? And it's all achievable. Today's episode is all about branding, but not the fluffy let's make the logo pretty kind.

We're talking about brand as an actual growth lever for a company. Three conversations with one common theme. How the right brand decision can double your revenue or how skipping it can quietly kill a good product. We'll start with Simon Pound, the guy behind some of New Zealand's best known startup rebrands. What it actually means to build a brand versus just running ads. Let's get into it. What's your favorite case study out of those nine years, your favorite rebranding that you did? And maybe walk us through the process as well. How does it usually work when the founder comes to you and says, "I understand the value of branding. I need to do something here. Simon, please help me." Well, I think a cool one to talk to could be appetize.

Is there um people in your portfolio as well that you guys have um been part of the journey? So they're a really great example of how brand can be a platform for your next stage of growth. So they came to us through Ice House Ventures, our partner in brand fund, the small VC fund that we have and Ice House were looking to lead around with them. They were called Menu Aid, which was a great name for their initial concept, which was just a menu app. But that team there, an app that helped people do grocery shopping and chose their meals that they would cook for the week and then got the right recipe and they were charging members of that community something like four bucks a week or something to use the service.

And that's what it was. It was a menu. But what they worked out and and its goal was to kind of like kill admin. So get rid of the admin. And then what they had done is worked out that from the huge amount of data they were getting about what people's shopping habits were, what food they wanted to cook, what recipe ingredients they substituted out, they had this trove of amazing data that food brands would love to know. So they created some really strong relationships with B2B customers, people like Fonta and, you know, a lot of the biggest brands on your supermarket shelves, and said, "Hey, would you be interested in getting access to this data?" And so they built out this new category of behavior-based B2B FMCG kind of food brand insights.

So they needed a brand that would cover um a change in the business model to be a brand in the world of food for food companies as well as they wanted to change their app from being the revenue driver to be free and then they wanted to be very welcoming and bring many many more people onto the platform. So, Menu Aid was good for the first stage, but it didn't fulfill that purpose. And so, we went, great, what a cool business. What an amazing founding team. Look at the progress they've made. They haven't even touched their food brand for the last like year because they've been working so hard building out the B2B side. What a perfect project.

So then we could come in and help capture the energy, generosity, hospitality, maybe yummness of the recipes they made every week and the way that they shared the food with everyone and make the whole brand feel like that cuz it had felt very thin and get to the point and no admin. It didn't do the fun stuff. When you think about a food brand, it wasn't like Gordon Ramsay or Nigella Lawson or Jamie Oliver or like a magazine. You know, you think about food magazines, you think about recipe books, and you think about restaurants, and you think about dinner parties, and it's all generosity and y, but that wasn't captured yet. And so, we came up with a very simple strategy.

Move from being kind of admin to being advertising. And from that, the name kind of popped out, advertise, sounds kind of like a tech company, sounds kind of yum, sounds kind of active, cool. And then we used that as the base of doing a brand that was all about generosity, hospitality, and yum essentially. and then a professional version of that for the food companies because they also care about the same things as the users. So that was like a dream project cuz we were able to just show to the external world what was true internally. Work really closely with that team to capture what was important to them. And then that relaunch that Toby and Elise ran brilliantly led to a 20% bump in customer users of their free app overnight from the media coverage and the interest and then since that time have you know quadrupled revenue to 3x moved to Australia built a

big team got other great VC involved and now have um the opportunity to really lead this platform into new markets and be a really significant business. And the cool thing is that that brand that we made them kind of 3 years ago now is still, you know, that they're executing it so well and it still is like helping to capture and carry that energy and optimism and just how just how great a team that they are. So that's quite like a dream project and it's a dream project cuz we invested in it from brand fund. We invested in it from previously off our balance sheet and we have you know had like a great relationship because they have known that we are making our suggestions as investors and partners because we really think they'll work not because we want to you know make some nice imagery.

It's like we really believe that this will be a horse multiplier for your business. So we have a great relationship on the work that we've done and we've become good mates as a result. Yeah. And it's Yeah. Toby was on the podcast a few months ago and they obviously just raised the series A which we were part of as well. So, it's a great success story overall and yeah, we love the brand. It's it looks really cool and um yeah, the way you describe it really makes sense. So, Simon just walked us through the appetizer brand turning a menu app into a proper food brand and it wasn't just a nicer look, it moved the needle on growth.

Now, we're bringing on the guy who lived through it from the other side, Toby, the co-founder of Appetize. what that rebrand actually did for the business and why he thinks the food brands winning right now are the ones building a cult following, not just a bigger product range. Do they see like an uptick in sales? Can you tell us? I think the biggest wins that we're getting like from immediate uplifts in sales is helping with like positioning and the stuff you're mentioning before, partnerships, collaborations, activations, helping them really think about how would someone truly use this and what is the best way to like go to market strategy, get it in front of as many people.

And so we've had awesome examples where, you know, brands have like doubled their sales in a month or they've had major uplifts just from like leveraging smart information, which is super inspiring and it's the kind of case studies we need to help bring on more brands. So, so what's next in the next 3 to 5 years? So, you got the 10ear vision. How do you get there over the next 3 to 5 years? So, we've distilled it down into I guess these like core buckets. We we want to be a global business. So we want to build panels in multiple markets around the world. So we're looking a lot at the US right now. And so yeah, we've had amazing traction in Australia.

We've got a very repeatable model. So just thinking about that. Um there's this whole idea around like product excellence and and thinking how do we get to product market fit? And it's kind of a term that it gets trucked around a lot. And we've basically built this model where we can track like how much product market fit we have across our products. And we've built like a scoring system. And so we're at level one. We want to get to level four. So we got a wee while the way, but we're making good runs there. So aiming to get to kind of level three the next three to five years. Um and then yeah, just basically like our major major major major major focus is growth right now.

Just like helping build up awareness of what we do. And because it is new, we need brands to we don't have that market pool. You know, brands aren't going, I need that thing yet. They're going, I have a problem. I don't know who solves it. I don't know if anyone can solve this. And so we're kind of educating, trying to get out there. So that's our big focus is like trying to generate a bit more market pull as well. Toby, what is the what is the food brand of the future look like? The food brand of the future is going to shift away from making very uneducated bets that cost millions of dollars. I think they're going to be incredibly consumerentric and they're going to want to know who their consumers are inside and out and they're going to want to make sure they're delivering products that truly solve an unmet need.

And so I think we're going to see brands who are building these like deeply loyal communities and they really focus it on like a particular segment, a particular problem much like startups do, right? Like we really think about what is that market we serve, who is that core ICP. We have all these buzzwords and we have a way of thinking, but I think it can translate into these companies where they go actually we just serve this type of shopper and we do it so incredibly well and we build this like cultlike following like I think those are the brands that are going to be incredible versus the ones that we see today who have you know 400 products that touch kind of everyone not that meaningfully you know I think those will disappear.

What's an example of a brand that's doing that really well? There's one right now, I don't know if you invest in the like food and be space, but there's one right now who I think has done it like bestin-class. They're called Moody. I'm not sure if you've seen them. Hard to miss them on LinkedIn at the moment, but it's a a husband and wife duo or a um boyfriend girlfriend duo and they've built like a prebiotic soda company and they have this super targeted customer that they're going after, this impeccable branding and this cultlike following. They basically get hundreds if not thousands of people's to flood the stores that they're getting released in and they clean out the shelves.

It's just it's amazing and it's good. Everyone's paying attention. Everyone wants to be like them. Yeah. Yeah. Giving away a Range Rover. That'll help. Oh, interesting. Giving away a Range Rover. That's the first thing I see on this site. Yeah. So, what what is this? This is a company that does prebiotics. Probiotics. Okay. or like who it was who's a customer and why why do you like this? I could tell you I just think it's the um if you look at like all the tick boxes for growth like they've built they've built an incredible brand. So if you like look at the brand it's very clean it's exciting. It's modern. They've created products. I mean I I don't consume these products.

I'll disclaim. I'm no way involved. But um they've obviously they're targeting an area that's incredibly popular and that there's a big market pool for. I don't know if you saw recently Poppy, a company that was acquired like a billion dollars in the probiotic soda space. So there's this huge pool and they've just the two founders have built this incredible like cultlike following which um yeah, I think it's amazing. I mean they've done a great job. They're clearly like listening to their customers. um they're building things that they want. They're communicating with them regularly. It's very consumer centric which is yeah been great. Great to see. So Toby talked about brands like Moody and Poppy building this insane cult like following just by listening closely to the customers.

But how do you actually know what your audience wants before you build the whole brand on it? That's exactly where our next guest comes in. and I co-founded Sticky Beak, a platform that helps brands test everything, names, logos, messaging with real customer feedback before they commit. Let's get into how that actually works. Less Mills, we actually had a separate account where we would run creative testing because we knew if we put bad creative into our main account, we could really kill the whole algorithm of the whole account. It cost but we would spend decent amounts of money testing over uh with that separate audience uh to understand what was going on. you like what I say to to our customers is like if you get it and it's 40% good, maybe Metal or Tik Tok will help you optimize to 50 55% good, it's that's still pretty average and you've paid money to do that

as well, by the way, and put your brand out there with some crap messaging that your target audience doesn't resonate with. Whereas, if you can pre-est it, get the messaging right, like I always say, test the ingredients, not the cake. So test the imagery, test the messaging, test the call to action, test the offer, get all those ingredients right, then you can make creative that's 80% great and yeah, let Meta hit at home to get you to 90 95%. And whether that's click-through rate or or whatever, but a lot of media running on these channels is awareness based and consideration based. And then your metrics are really tough platform. Like maybe a like or a share will give you an indication, but really it's just about getting your message out there with the most affordable and effective reach metrics, reach and frequency, but you don't know what they think after seeing it.

And that's the sort of stuff we can pretest for as well. So what words come to mind? I've shown you an ad. I've taken that ad away. Now what brand was it for? You be amazed how much marketing is done and people don't even know who it's for. So all those little decisions, those things that feel challenging as a marketer that sometimes makes you go just make the logo 20% bigger. All those things that you're constantly battling just gives you some data and some information to make better decisions. If we were starting right from the beginning, we'd be testing brand names. So what brand name are you thinking for your for your business? Um lots of you might have some language you might want to use and that if you want to be a global business, you want to make sure that that word doesn't mean something strange in a country that you're looking to

export to and this happens a lot. So, let's run some names. Let's see what those names mean to people. So, a sticky big test gives you some quant and some quo. So, you get what's most popular, but kind of more importantly, why they chose that option cuz you might be going for a really like athletic fitness, you know, you know, something really strong and hardcore brand. And if your word is coming back and they're like, "Oh, it's nice and it feels comfortable and it's all this language that you don't want to be associated with your brand, even if it's popular, you might discount it." But then you work through your marketing, your full brand development.

You might launch your first campaign. You might have a product you're launching. Maybe you decide to do a drink bottle and you're not sure if you should do aluminum or plastic. And so you want to test the format of that and see what people think and at a different price point. Um, then you might have, you know, some colors and some different options and sizes around that drink bottle. So, the kind of as you evolve your product line and your campaigns and you go into new markets, just these constant ongoing questions and decisions you need to make, Sticky Beak is there to just put those out to your audience, get it back in 48 hours and you can keep moving.

Yeah. So, you would jump on, you'd put your variance into one of our sort of pre-approved research templates. It might take you a minute, might take you 2 minutes. You choose your audience. you maybe want to choose Germany and the UK males 18 to 34. So you hit hit launch on that algorithm will then say okay based on that age and those geographies we're going to recruit the audiences then this way. So it might be meta tik tok or research panel it will go out and invite people to answer your test just your test no one else's. So they'll come in, they'll answer those four or five questions, they'll give their feedback, and then you'll get a lovely email hopefully with those markets within 24 hours that says your results are in.

Our big focus is making sure your results page is really easy to understand. So we'll take those open-enders and we'll summarize them using AI to put them into themes and pull you out some verbatim quotes that you can maybe pop into your presentation to convince your boss that's what the right thing to do. And then yeah, then you've got your results. You choose a color, sales go crazy, everyone's the winner. Thank you for tuning in to TechMates. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share with friends. We'll be back soon with more stories of Kiwi and Aussie founders reshaping the future and disrupting Down Under. Until next time, keep dreaming big and daring to disrupt.