#374 - Krish Menon - Founder @ Angry Gods - How The World’s Most Iconic Brands Are Built

Chris Powers: I've worked with marketing agencies for 15 years and I've never really worked with anybody that has the gifts that you have. So, I wanted to just start with, do you remember a point growing up where you knew you saw the world differently or could bring things to life that nobody else could? 

Krish Menon: I had a computer science teacher in high school, I went to an all-boys high school in India, and I had a computer science teacher that once said to me, you have the gift of gab. I had no idea what that meant back then. And what was funny about it is, and I must have been in like the seventh or eighth grade, eighth grade, I think. And what I used to be able to do when I was growing up is I used to be able to, I used to concoct crazy stories. I had imaginary friends until I was like 11 or 12. I made my dad make business cards for me when I was nine because I wanted to start a detective agency. And I would go around, I would say we investigate anything, and there are cats missing or a little missing piece of food, we would try and investigate it. But it was all I think leading towards this notion that stories have always been part of my culture. And I think that being able to tell stories a certain way, whether that is in the form of a paper in college or whether that's the form of a commercial or a design system, that's really been my focus, telling stories. 

Chris Powers: All right. Well, then we'll kind of start diving right into the deep end. So, for those listening, what I want to get out of today with you is how you have thought about and developed incredible brands, and we'll talk about it from a lot of different angles. But let's just kind of set the tone with like, if I say to you, what is a brand, what is a brand? 

Krish Menon: Sure. So, a lot of people define brands in different ways, and part of the reason is because the notion of what a brand means to someone depends on where they are with their brand at that time. So, to a lot of people, a brand is a sum total of the feelings that you have when you look at something or a product or a service. To me, what I've always felt is the brand is the reason you stay with something that doesn't work and the reason you try something that you haven't tried. And the stickiness is a critical component of this. Brands allow a product to essentially fail a little bit. And that's the thing that most people don't recognize. The notion that having a brand allows you to have a product that has a little bit more leeway to fail because the brand keeps you going for a little bit. And that notion of building that equity, that notion of I feel something for this, and therefore no matter what it does, I'm going to stand up for it, that's actually a brand. And if you think about people, that's the brand of a politician. If you think about friends, that's the brand of a friend. Hey, that person wouldn't do that. No. Who are you going to go to this movie with? I think I'm going to pick this person. All of that is a notion of a feeling, and every single one of those represents the brand of that thing that you're talking about. And not a logo, not just a design, but it's the feeling that comes from it. 

Chris Powers: Okay, and real quick, and then I'm going to ask you something else on what you just said, why are brands like tofu? 

Krish Menon: Names, I said names are like tofu. Yeah, so I say this all the time. So, I talk about the fact that names are like tofu because, think about this for a second, if you were naming one of the largest most powerful companies in the world today, they came to you and said we do all of these amazing things. We have the most advanced AI, we have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees around the world, and we power almost every single desktop in corporate America. What do you want to call it? I said to you, let's call it Microsoft – sounds like a flaccid penis. I mean, you might laugh me out of the room. Or if a lifestyle company came to you and said, hey, we are the most beautiful, lifestyle-oriented, innovative brand for people wanting to have fun. We do travel, we do hotels, all of that. What should we call it? Oh, and by the way, we want to appeal to women and men, but we really want to be a progressive brand. Oh, let's call it Virgin. We would get laughed out of the room. You want to call the brand Virgin? That's insane. But when you think about the name Microsoft right there, you think about the name Virgin, you don't think about what the word means. You think about all the things that they have surrounded it with. And that's essentially what happens with tofu. You put tofu in a dish, it tastes like shit. It tastes like nothing. It tastes like absolutely nothing. But you surround it with flavors, and it eventually takes on whatever you want it to. And that's the beautiful thing about tofu, which is that you can make it taste like anything. And that's what a name can actually do. Now, by the way, does that mean that you should start with whatever name you want? No, because you don't want to start from a hole. You don't want to start in a place that's negative. You don't want to start in a place where the name itself has negative connotation somewhere. You don't want that. But I always say to clients who come and say, oh, we have a terrible name, we need to change it, I go, your name's not the problem. There's something else that's the problem. We need to fix that. 

Chris Powers: But do you- and again, I know you don't know this, but when they were coming up with Virgin, like is it in hindsight we can look back and say Virgin worked out because they built a remarkable business, but maybe when they were naming it, like the name to them, actually, they wanted it to be associated with Virgin? You know what I'm saying? 

Krish Menon: Yeah, I think that from Richard Branson’s stand point, I’m obviously not in his head, I would assume that he wanted it to be one of these things where it's like birthing a new, like something brand new, something interesting and new and built. That could have been where it came from. I don't know the etymology of where it came from in his own head. I do know where the etymology of Microsoft came from. It was microcomputers and software. And so, they said, let's put the two together. 

Chris Powers: Okay. If we go back to what you were talking about, branding, it's like how you feel, I'll ask you questions and you can say I'm not a scientist, but like what happens, you've studied people and how they react to things pretty much your whole career, like what happens, whether it's a political party or a drink that you like or whatever, what happens in your brain or heart that makes you connect to a brand? 

Krish Menon: So Neanderthal men, when we were mostly functioning from a limbic brain, which is this little part over here, the limbic brain essentially had four types of reactions. So someone would come by, you'd look at that person, and you'd feel one of four things in the limbic system. You would feel good, like you're okay. This person feels... and by the way, we feel this. When we meet someone, we'll go, that person seems like a cool person. Like, you have generally warm feelings towards that person. Second feeling, your hair stands up on your neck. Like, that's what the limbic brain would go, fear, something's wrong here. We have that feeling now. Have you met a person where you go, something’s off with that person. Like, I don't like that person much. You don't know why; like, you have no idea why. By the way, we justify these limbic reactions with rational reasons. His hair, his shoes, the way she speaks, that laugh. We say all these things. The third feeling that we have is mate. I want to mate with that person. That was the limbic brain going, because procreation was big back then, and one of the things they'd go is I want to mate. And by the way, years and years and years of hundreds of years, thousands of years of evolution and societal constructs have gotten us to a point where instead of banging someone over the head with a club and dragging them back to your thing or basically jumping on each other, which is what they potentially, the limbic brain would typically make you do, we now go on dates, we court each other, we have context that comes together. So what's interesting is all those three are normal reactions. We feel someone good, we hang out with them, we think they're great. We don't like someone, we try and not do business with them, we try and not hang out with them. When we have the notion of mate, we go on dates with them and we see what happens. Happens all the time. But the fourth limbic reaction is the most important of all, which is indifference. Indifference is where you walk by and you don't even notice this person. You walk by, you don't even notice this thing. And what is really challenging for brands is that for the most part, people have indifference about you. You just pass by, you don't notice. You see a bottle and you see a thing and you don't notice. You hear something, you don't react to it. Sometimes you'll have a, oh, I love that reaction. Sometimes you'll have a I hate that reaction. Sometimes you'll have a, well, I don't know what they call it, the mate reaction for brands is, but sometimes people fall in love with brands. But the point is indifference. You don't want people to be indifferent. And I think the feeling that you're trying to generate with people, the thing that brands need to do is to essentially figure out how to not create indifference in people. And creating non-indifference requires polarity, and I speak about this all the time, which is that if you're a brand, you must polarize people. You can't be everything to everyone. If you want people to love you, you're going to have to accept the fact that some people will hate you. 

Chris Powers: And I'm assuming that like brands, and I'll just throw out some things that are top of mind, you take like a Tesla, but then you put Elon Musk behind it, or Trump hotels, like if Donald Trump didn't exist and you just heard Trump, it wouldn't be great, but the guy behind the thing makes it like explosive. 

Krish Menon: Absolutely. So I'll give you an example. In Soho, there was a, on Varick Street, there's a hotel called Trump Soho. Long time, it used to be up there. A few years ago, when Trump first went into office, they changed the name to the Dominic Hotel. And one of the reasons they changed the name to the Dominic Hotel is because there was polarity in what was happening. The polarity of people coming in there who were more red state and more Trump like were much louder than the voices of the blue state coming in, which makes sense. Oh, the feelings are heightened. People feel a certain way, and then they essentially go and gravitate towards things that pull people in or not. Whether or not the borrowed equity of a person like Trump or the borrowed equity of a person like Elon Musk actually affects a brand completely depends on how that person is building their brand. I fundamentally think that Trump has gotten to the point where- by the way, I think he's one of the world's greatest marketers, in my opinion, the way he does the things that he does. But I think the way the world has gotten is that the polarity has gotten us to a place where people look at individuals, and they ascribe what they feel for that individual to the context of the brands that they have. What's happening right now in culture is actually fascinating. There's an entire social media backlash challenge, whole drama thing happening around a movie called It Ends With Us. Have you heard about this? Okay, so It Ends With Us, a book by Colleen Hoover, a really great book about, novel about domestic violence. The protagonist- and the two protagonists basically are a couple where they have a very tumultuous relationship, and it's really meant as an ode to domestic violence. It was meant for- and so Justin Baldoni, a self-appointed feminist, got the rights to the book, spent years trying to put it together, made the movie, had this incredibly great reception to it being made. But then what happened is, after the movie launched, a few things started happening. Drama within the movie started playing out. Blake Lively, who was the lead in the movie, and Justin apparently went along with talking. She unfollowed him. All the people unfollowed him from social media. He became a pariah. Then she put out a complaint that he sexually harassed her during the filming. She puts out these text messages in this complaint that explodes through social media, like hundreds of millions of views, people commenting about it everywhere, all over TikTok. And then, Justin's quiet for a while. And then he comes back out and he shows that many of the texts that were put together had missing emojis taken out of context. Turns out he was the one that was being bullied. And so now the tides have turned. And what's interesting is, all this while, Blake Lively's brand that she just launched, it’s called Blake Brown, by their own reports have dropped 76% in sales. It's fascinating that what happens with an individual now does directly affect the brands that they put out. 

Chris Powers: So do you think, and again, we don't have to go long on this, but the whole world has been like influencer marketing and every influencer needs to have their own brand? Do these make these businesses actually pretty fragile? Like are we learning that they're great when they're great and then they can evaporate as soon as you're P. Diddy and you get the call that you're doing some bad things? 

Krish Menon: It does. I fundamentally believe that you cannot build a brand without doing proper brand development. And the challenge with being a massive celebrity of any kind is that you have the ability to accelerate yourself onto the landscape in a way that gets your product out there, people buying it, but you haven't done all the core development of the brand that you really need to do to give it longevity. And so a lot of times what happens is they crash and burn. And one of the reasons this happens with a lot of celebrities is because the people that surround them, the managers and the agents, are looking to make money quickly and they're looking to actually put things out quickly. So, they make deals with manufacturers, they make deals with other partners that essentially guarantee money up front, not thinking about how long does this brand need to live, where does it sit. Commercially, there are celebrities who are trying to be entrepreneurs, people who are essentially building brands for the long term and building things up. Kylie Jenner's brand is an incredibly well-built brand, strong brand, billion dollar brand, doing really well. I think Jessica Alba has done an amazing thing with the Honest Company that's built itself out pretty well. There's a few people you can look at that actually do that well. 

Chris Powers: Okay. We've talked a little bit about a good brand, and we're going to kind of talk about how you think about conceptualizing to product launch, but what do- because you see companies with really talented, like the huge marketing teams and these amazing agencies, and I'm sure you look, you're like, man, it took 20 people to come up with the worst possible brand I could have imagined. Where do people get misguided to where you spend all this money, energy, and resources and end up with a terrible thing? How does that happen? 

Krish Menon: So, I'll ask you a question. When you're- if you were to go and buy- You have kids, right? How old are your kids? 

Chris Powers: Eight, five, and two. 

Krish Menon: Okay. So let's say your daughter is going to go to prom at some point. Do you have a daughter? 

Chris Powers: I have two daughters, eight, five, and then a son, two. 

Krish Menon: So let's say your daughter's going to go to prom, but prom theme this year is glam couture. It's going to be Met Gala type prom. They want to do something really cool. You are given the option to go pick out the dress for her. You and only you. She has to wear what you pick. What do you think's going to happen? 

Chris Powers: It's going to be so terrible and cheap. 

Krish Menon: That's the challenge. What happens is we assign importance of feedback level to the level you are at a company. So when companies organize themselves, they're organized in hierarchies, CEO, CMO, COO, they also do a lot of group think. They'll bring groups. This happens all the time. Hey, we're bringing our entire executive team here to look at the design directions you guys have put together. And then everybody has an opinion. Everybody has an opinion going, oh, that room- I'll give you a fantastic example. I have a client that’s actually based in Dallas. We were building a new brand that is an Uber of a home services category. It's going to be a national brand, highly tech oriented, but taking an old archaic service business that was primarily smelly and bad and turning it into a powerful, get yourself there quickly kind of Uber-like system. Love that. They were called a terrible name. We changed the name to something really fun, Mother. Like, mother, that's a... But then we put some designs together for it. One person's spouse said, that looks like a vagina. So that started this entire cascade of even if one person thinks it’s a vagina, it’s going to be a vagina. And I wish I could show you the thing. It was a circle with- it was a pink circle, but apparently it looked like a vagina. But the point being, when voices that have authority, some kind of authority, so in this case, the founder's wife, and who essentially then put their opinion, which by the way, is a totally valid opinion to them and no shame on them, it affects the way brands work because not everybody has good taste. Not everybody understands good brands. If companies would stop doing group think on approvals, if companies would stop saying that because this person is at this level, they need to buy into this campaign, everything would be different. A lot of times what you think in your mind is not what your customer wants. 

Chris Powers: Okay, so you've worked with the Fortune 500, Fortune 50 global companies, you've worked with them all, big, small, tall. If you had to say, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast, and you said, if I was working with you, either this is the person or these are the people that should weigh in on the brand, like is there a common theme of what makes the most successful decision? Because I would imagine on that Mother thing, in another context where the wife didn't think that, maybe that ends up being the brand. Like, who do you hope for as the decision maker? 

Krish Menon: So, different stages have different types of thinking. So, when entrepreneurs are founders, they want to buy and own everything. So, one of two things has to happen. You have to either recognize that you don't know great branding, which 100% happens all the time, which is why so many brands are mediocre, because people essentially put their image of branding into it, and it doesn't- it couldn't be as great as it is. At the brand strategy stage, which is essentially saying, who are we and what do we do? By the way, we did this with your own brand where we sat and looked at it. That notion of the why, the what, and the how is something that I think as an entrepreneur and as a founder, you should own. You should be 100% convinced that that's the narrative that you want. Because the narrative essentially is what the creatives take and say, let's make this look a certain way. The second part of it is applying that strategy to the expression of it. So there's strategy, and then I sometimes say to people, hey, your strategy is showing, and your strategy is showing to me is this really fun thing where people take what is explicitly strategic language, and they put it in front of people and go, hey, this is what the brand is about. Sometimes you need to translate that. You need to make it sound better. So, what I would say is if you're an entrepreneur or founder and you want to actually build a great visual brand as much as a good strategic brand, make sure that you understand if you're a good visual person or not. Make sure you understand your limitations of whether or not you have good taste and let a person who has great taste drive that for you. A lot of times though, you don't have the ability to bring in a creative director, et cetera, so then find a partner that you trust and let them kind of do their work. 

Chris Powers: And again, I'm sure you've met people that think they have great taste that don't. If somebody's sitting there going like, I wonder if I have good taste or not, is there a simple way they could figure out if they do or not? And is it almost essential for a great brand, for the founder to relentlessly care about it? Or do you meet founders that are like, I don't care, I just want to build the computer, I just want to build Apple, could care less what it's called, I'll let Johnny Ive do all that? Or did- you know what I mean? 

Krish Menon: Founders can build either great companies or great companies and great brands. There's a difference. A great company does good business, does great transactional work, has a solid sales team, drives revenue, makes good profit, has great EBITDA, and provides great value back to investors. A great brand does that for a very long time, exponentially increasing the value of it simply by being the brand. And that's the power of brand. I have lots of counterparts. I'm not good at certain things. I'm not good at building companies. I'm not a financial guy that sits there and goes, let me build the model that sits and does this. I have a couple of partners who are actually so good at that that I look at them and go, how do you do that? How do you sit there and figure that model out? How do you know where that business model's going? At the same time, they always defer to me when it comes to what the brand should look like and how it should speak and what it should be because we trust each other. And that's the main thing that I would think about. Building a company is not the same as building a brand. 

Chris Powers: Yep, okay. Real quick, you were talking about narrative. It made me think of something that you have talked about in the past, the 1:9:90 concept, like how a narrative gets to the audience. Can you explain 1:9:90? 

Krish Menon: Sure. So, I call it the passion populations model. And it actually comes from the CIA. So, the propaganda model that originally started, there were people who essentially wanted to put propaganda out. And what they would do, because they didn't want to be attacked and they didn't want to actually be exposed too much, it was too dangerous for them to go out in public and tell all these stories. So what they would do is they would find, that's the one, they would find the nine people that could get to the 90 people. They would find the town criers, they would find the people that essentially spread the propaganda, which is why a lot of times the people who essentially, when they search for propaganda spreaders, they were searching for the people who were the mouthpieces to the 1%. Because those people were never exposed because it was too dangerous for them to be exposed. But that same model has come back into play in social media now. What's essentially happened is we've created a mechanism where there are people that we actually trusted our network to give us information more than we trust the news. A really good example would be there's a guy named Wisdm, W-I-S-D-M. You can find him on Instagram or any of the- Wisdm's just this tall black dude who lives in New York who started by basically going to Target and putting together looks for himself, like I'm going to dress up a certain way. He got so good, his taste was so interesting, and his taste was so universally loved, that he has now skyrocketed to be one of the biggest fashion influencers on the planet. And that notion of being able to get there is because he start- the influence that he has started to go from this much to this much. Now, there's a Wisdm, like Wisdm is for the world, there's a Wisdm in everyone's network. There's that one person you trust who you go, I'm going to call that person to find out if this tie is the right thing for me. I'm going to call that person and find out if this is... there's a person that you call when you go, hey, what color should I paint this wall? There's a person that you call when you want to know if something looks good on you. That person sometimes, by the way, is your spouse. That person sometimes is someone who you care about impressing. But when you want to impress other people and you want an opinion, there is that one person you call because that person has that opinion. That's the nine. If you can find the nine to every one that's out there, you don't need to go to the 90 because that nine will spread the message for you. That's the general context. And we can now do that scientifically through social media by actually analyzing over a billion social media profiles and figuring out clusters of people that will spread right kinds of information for you. 

Chris Powers: I guess the flip side to that would be being like a, being somebody so large, like an Elon Musk, that you're just skipping everybody. Like, you are the brand. 

Krish Menon: Yeah. But there's only 15 of those people in the world. And that's totally fine. Look, Elon is in an entire class by himself, and Elon's a fascinating brand for me. He is caustic, but he is brilliant. He is truly moving humanity forward. I fundamentally believe that. But he is hated as much as he's loved. There are people who are Elon fanboys to the hilt. There are people who hate him as much. But the truth is, how he behaves personally has a lot to do with it. Look at the way Warren Buffet behaves. He doesn't talk to the public. He doesn't- he's not out there. He's the Grand Sage of Omaha. He's got this notion of I'm going to sit back, I'm in my old house, I still drive my old Buick or whatever that car that he drives is. But people listen when he has an opinion. The chairman of J.P. Morgan, my God, Jamie Dimon, has a very similar construct in that he's a little bit more out in the world, he speaks a little bit more out there, but he's considered like he has gravitas. Elon, if you think about the- you don't have the word gravitas against Elon, you have gravitas against the things that he's doing, like did you see what they were able to do with SpaceX where they were able to catch that rocket with... I mean, the engineering, you can't even talk about the amount of engineering that goes into being able to do something like that. And they did that on the first try. That's gravitas, but it's overshadowed by his juvenile way in which he essentially kind of comes at people. But that's the brand that he's built. And if you think about X, by the way, X is Elon. He basically turned Twitter, which was kind of a viable little brand, into him. Like, if you think about X and you think about Elon, you look at them and you go, they feel the same. They make me feel the same thing. And that's the fun thing. 

Chris Powers: Do you think if his name was, let's say his name was like Ted Smith, like the most boring American name ever, do you think his name has something to do with this? As a branding person, could his name be anything and it would still be- you'd feel it the same way? 

Krish Menon: It would. You know why? Names are like tofu. They take on whatever you put around it. He surrounds himself with all the flavors of stuff, so if he were Ted Smith, we'd be talking about, can you believe Ted Smith did that? 

Chris Powers: Okay, so we'll spend, I wasn't planning on this, but I wrote down three things just to have a little fun on this because it seems like CEO branding is kind of big right now. I wrote down CEO outfit. Every CEO now has like the black leather jacket, the black t-shirt, like Jensen Huang with NVIDIA, Elon. What are they portraying and why does it kind of go viral? Like why do CEOs all of a sudden begin to look a certain way? And then the next topic's going to be the rebranding of Mark Zuckerberg, which has been just, I mean, a case study. 

Krish Menon: Fascinating. So, years ago, Steve Jobs put out in an interview or maybe in a magazine, there was basically a thing where he talked about why he only wore black turtlenecks and those jeans. And he said that I save seven to eight minutes every day where I don't actually have to think about what I'm wearing. And therefore, it gives me this many extra days a year in order to do these things. Now, whether or not that's truly attributed to him, there's something to that context, this idea of a uniform for the kind of person that I am. And if you- there's a gentleman named Alan Faena who owns a hotel called the Faena Hotel in Miami and in Buenos Aires. And he has this signature white cap that he wears with this long white shirt and white pants and people instantly recognize him. There's a notion of CEOs essentially wanting to brand themselves, but in a way that doesn't feel over the top. And I think that a simple way to do that is to create a uniform for yourself. And that uniform starts to identify for people who essentially love you and who look up to you something for them to aspire to. I'm going to dress like Jensen. I'm going to dress like Steve Jobs. I'm going to dress like so-and-so. I think that that's what it is. I would suspect some of them have stylists. I would suspect some of them are- by the way, very few CEOs that I know of, other than the truly flamboyant ones that are really more figureheads than actual CEOs, spend time changing their clothes and dressing up in a certain way. But if you go to LVMH in Paris, if you go to any of the fashion houses in Paris, if you go to... they all dress up and have very specific sartorial constructs that they put together, both female and male. Los Angeles has a divorce attorney that has been in vogue for how stylish she is. The name is Laura Wasser. They based George Clooney's character, George Massey, from that Intolerable Cruelty, they based it on her as she's one of the most feared divorce attorneys in the world, but she dresses like she is in Vogue magazine, and she's known for that. Everyone has a signature, and I think it's all about figuring out what your signature is. 

Chris Powers: Do you believe, as a branding person, do you believe Mark Zuckerberg's new persona with the MMA and the chain and the long hair? Or can you take it too far where you're kind of in like, you can kind of tell you're forcing it territory? 

Krish Menon: Mark's interesting. As a person who studies brands, he's interesting. He obviously, they talk about moving from geek to chic, there's obviously that transition that's happened. He's gotten buffer. He's working out more. He's clearly- he looks more confident. He clearly has kind of gone through a personal transformation. And part of that, I think, if I were to, I don't know this, but if I were to wager, I would say that he has had someone working with him on personal stuff. I would wager that he has been working with someone on very specifically the kind of look that he needs to have. Did you see the viral photo of someone added a little bit of stubble to his face and it became the big rizz picture? Now, all of that kind of gets you to a point where people are going, hey, this guy isn't- this guy's kind of cool. I want to be part of it. By the way, they call it pretty privilege. This is true of anything. What about the guy who just murdered the CEO of United Healthcare? How people are fawning over him? They have T-shirts where people are wearing things about him. Do you think that same thing would be happening if he didn't look like he did? Absolutely not. That notion of how he looks allows people to get away with certain things. And I think maybe Mark is potentially ascribing to that. 

Chris Powers: What was her name that used to be on the cooking show and she made everything with butter? She's like a Southern woman. 

Krish Menon: Julia Childs. 

Chris Powers: No, this is like maybe 10 or 15 years ago. 

Krish Menon: Ina Garten? 

Chris Powers: No, what's her damn name? I'll think of it, but she was this Southern cooking, put everything- Johnny look it up. Cooked everything with butter and she was kind of big and she just like fit- 

Krish Menon: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I see her now with the blonde... 

Chris Powers: Yes, but it's like if she was some really skinny fit person making buttery cakes... Paula Dean, that's right. There's a whole Onion article. It's like the funniest thing ever. 

Krish Menon: That's right, yeah. That's exactly right. 

Chris Powers: You can't sell buttery pies if you're like lean and thin. Like you gotta fit the role and it would have never worked. 

Krish Menon: You can't. So there's a guy on TikTok who basically willed himself into rizz existence. And rizz, by the way, is short for charisma, which is where the word comes from, but essentially, it's used to indicate the fact that people essentially have rizz, they have the ability to attract the opposite sex. That's the whole point of rizz. So, you should look up this guy named Zachirific, Z-A-C-H-I-R-I-F-I-C, Zachirific. He started doing these funny videos of how he was the center of everything. When someone broke up with someone because they were caught cheating with a guy, he would say, yeah, I know, I'm sorry, I cheated with her, and she just came at me. And so he started doing these videos where he would just put himself as the- he's a fat bearded kind of chubby dude, and he puts himself into the center of these, and now suddenly, he willed himself into that world where now he's dating the women that he used to act like he used to date. Which is kind of a really fascinating thing when you think about it. 

Chris Powers: Okay, if I came to you today, I'm an awesome founder, I have an awesome idea, but I don't have a name, I don't have a brand, and I said, Krish, I want to work with you, what is the beginning process? Like, what are- how do we begin to even think about where this could go? Like, how do you start? 

Krish Menon: Well, so whether it's with me or not, here are the general steps I like to tell founders to follow when they think about it. The first thing is you need to have an idea for what you're doing. A lot of times people come to you and they don't even have that. The product's not set. And I always say great branding for a bad product is the fastest way to put it out of business. You really need a great product. So I always analyze whether or not I want to work with someone based off of whether or not they actually have a viable business. Now, some categories where I don't know the business, it's hard to know, but you do as much work as you can do. But first of all, make sure you have a good business. Then people then always go, well, I need to name it, I need to create a website, I need to do these things. Those are all tactical things. I think what you have to start thinking about is what is the brand narrative that you want? And by the way, this is if you're willing to go from a product to a brand. If you go, I have a product, and now I actually want a brand because I want it to have longevity, I want it to mean something to a certain group of people, but it could be a group of a hundred people. It could be a group of 10 million people. It doesn't matter. But I want it to mean something. And I just don't want to be able to- Sure, if I put it out in front of them, if I put it where they are, they'll buy it. So why do I need a brand? Why do I need any kind of fascinating group? Because you want so that when someone else comes in and sells that same type of product to the same people, you want them to go, no, I prefer this instead. And not take it because someone has a cheaper price, not because someone gives it to you faster, not because someone even sometimes has a better product. See, what most people don't understand is that brand allows you to have a worse product and still sell. And that's the key thing to a brand. You cannot do that if you're doing product marketing. You will fail. Okay, so the first thing you do is figure out what your brand narrative is. From that narrative, that narrative will give rise to a few things. What should we call it? How should we talk about it? What should the expression of it be? And what should we call it is the name. What should we- how should we talk about it is the voice. And what should the expression be is the visual identity. And once you have that, then you can start kind of putting together all of the artifacts that you need, the website, and that combines the words and the visuals, the collateral, any of the material that you might need. And depending on whether you're a digital brand, whether you're a physical brand, different needs come up with different- 

Chris Powers: Is the color scheme more important than the name or the shape of the font? Like, do they all work together? Is there one that is most important? 

Krish Menon: It's all of it is just, all of it comes together. One of the longest- you remember when you and I were working on your own brand, which I think hopefully people will see soon. One of the things that came up is it was very hard for you to settle in on the exact color because you had a vision in your head. Now there are people who have that context, who want it to feel a certain way. That's good because sometimes you as the founder need to feel comfortable with the brand for it to go on. A good design team will take those colors and make it work any way it needs to be, because remember, the world out there has not seen the iterations you've seen. They're only seeing what you put out and they'll be happy with it as long as it's actually put out well. So, I always say, I think it's not about color scheme and it's not about name. It is really about the visual expression of what you're doing and does that actually ring a chord with you. 

Chris Powers: Okay. You have something, real quick, I didn't want to skip over, but you said, we believe everything is solvable. So, I'm assuming that ties into maybe the earlier stages of thinking through things, or like what's the context of that? 

Krish Menon: Branding firms and design, there's a lot of people who- let me talk about this in the context of singing. Have you ever gone to a person's house for dinner and they'll say to you, my God, my daughter, she sings so well. Let's listen to her sing. And she'll do this little thing for you. And you're sitting there, and it's amazing. You're like, oh, wow, she sang so well. And then you get in your car, and you go, my God, she's a good singer. My God, she should become a professional. And then the next day you go to Adele and go maybe not. Then you go- because you see the difference. And that's the problem with branding and marketing is that it is so easy to do at the base level that everybody tries to do it. So there's the sea of people that basically do that daughter type singing that's out there. And the subtle differences between what they do and what really good branding people do are so easily seen when you finally see the final product, but when you're making it, it's very hard to find the difference. And that's the key thing to think about here. There's a world of science and art that goes into making great brands come together. And because science and art in the context of branding is a little bit like going to Photoshop and doing different things, thousands and thousands of people try to do it, but they do it kind of like the local karaoke singers. And that's the big difference. And every now and then you'll find a good karaoke singer, by the way. 

Chris Powers: American Idol or that's how they- every now and again. Is there a spot in the process where people waste the most time, energy, and money? Like if you would just do X before working with a branding expert, you would save yourself so much pain, or is it a case-by-case deal? 

Krish Menon: It's a case-by-case deal. But I will say where I have found people falter the most is they go cheap in the beginning. Let me find this little graphic designer that gets this thing done. Let me work with someone on Fiverr and get this thing done. I just need a little logo. I'm just going to put up shop for a second. I'm going to get this done. Oh, I'll do a little bit of business cards. I'll go to Moo.com and get that done. And then eventually you build something and then you go, ah, it is not as strong as it could be. It's not. And by the way, there's no shame in any of those things. There's no shame in going to Fiverr. There's no shame in going to Moo and getting all that done. That is totally fine if you want to live in a certain type of brand house. But if you want to have a world-class brand, you need to have proper kind of thinking against it. And that, there are 650,000 branding firms all around the world, at last count, in general. Maybe five to eight thousand of them do a really, really good job. And so, for the most part, when you hire a branding firm, you're hiring one of the karaoke singers. 

Chris Powers: Does AI worry you at all? Is that five to eight thousand about to be ten? 

Krish Menon: No, actually AI is actually, for us, it's accelerating everything. So, you can actually, your audience can also go look at this, if you go to ChatGPT and search in the GPTs, you can type in naming Naming Norman. So I trained a GPT to basically, I gave it all of the things I knew about naming, and I created a naming system so that in the absence of being able to actually work with me, you can actually get some kind of a context of a name that comes from me. It actually walks you through a process that I would typically walk you through to figure out what the name should be. So you can go to Naming Norman and actually ask it to name anything, and it'll try and do it for you. So we've been experimenting with AI in all kinds of ways. We've been experimenting with AI in terms of figuring out how to put together campaign structures. We've been experimenting with AI in terms of how to think about brand narrative. If anything, it's going to accelerate things for us. 

Chris Powers: We'll drop a link in the show notes for Naming Norman. All right. I want to spend this last segment just on some storytelling. So, I've got a couple of stories you provided, and then I have a list of all the big companies you've worked on. There's a few that I know our listeners will talk about. So, I think this will be fun. story one, the gift registry. 

Krish Menon: So, this is very early in my career. I would have been in my early twenties. I was trying to make a name for myself with the agency that I was at. I had a client, and I was a junior person in the company, but nobody wanted to work on traditional retail because everyone wanted to work on the big dot-coms back then. And we're talking about 1999 or so, 1999, 2000 or so, 2000. And nobody wanted to work on traditional retail. And so I had gotten this retailer as a client within the agency and 300 plus stores around the country, housewares, homewares, kitchen wares, that kind of stuff. And they had hired McKinsey. It was McKinsey or one of the big four. I'm pretty sure it was McKinsey, or it could have been BCG, but I'm pretty sure it's McKinsey. They had hired McKinsey to figure out what to do about their things going out of stock, permanently out of stock forever, things that were broken, plates, essentially what to do with the excess inventory that they weren't selling. And McKinsey came up with a massive plan to create seven outlets, basically all around the country so that strategically things could be moved to these outlets and they would essentially create these outlet structures. The total cost outlay was $55 to $60 million to put all of this together. McKinsey had already charged them a couple of million dollars to put it together. And then I happened to see this giant deck that McKinsey had put together in order to kind of to create this outflow strategy. And this is actually when I realized not knowing something is actually sometimes the best way to get to a solution because I started reading through it, and I was thinking about the project that we were working on where we were building the wedding and gift registry for this particular brand. We were building the online wedding gift registry. They had a wedding gift registry right now in the stores, but we were making the online version. And wedding gift registry, and by the way, just so you know, 24% of American brides would register at this particular store. So it was a big registry. So I went to my client and said, I saw this thing, you guys are going to spend sixty million dollars on this thing? I think I can solve it with a couple hundred bucks. I said, we have all of this data of these items that are going out of stock, but we know which registries they're in for which brides. What if we went to the brides and said, hey, your dinner plates for your registry, your wedding dinner plates are going out of stock forever. Would you like to-? I said, we can create an auction for those. Instead of actually selling them at a discount, maybe we can sell them at a premium. And I said, all we need to do is send them emails to see if they'd be willing to actually buy them. And so, we sent out two test emails for two product lines saying, to anyone who had them registered, saying these plates are going out of stock forever, do you want to stock up on them in case they break, etc. 94% of them got sold. So what was fascinating about that was that entire strategy of building an outlet thing, shipping it over there, FedEx lines going back and forth, all of that didn't need to happen because we found a way to actually monetize it to an audience that held higher value for that specific item because of the context it was in. The magic trigger was telling them, your wedding plates are going out of stock forever. That was a big context. Ironically, I got fired for actually doing that because the agency I was working at was supposed to make a huge set of money against that purchase because the outlet stores would have their own websites, etc. 

Chris Powers: I would say it still worked out. 

Krish Menon: It worked out. 

Chris Powers: Vitamin water. It's not the drink for ballers, it's a drink for ballplayers. Or no, it's the drink for ballers, not the drink for ballplayers. 

Krish Menon: Yeah, so this is early on when I started Phenomenon. My partner and I were working with Glaceau which is a client of Vitamin Water and there was a core strategy that I think changed everything for them which was that they were competitive to Gatorade and Gatorade was really about thirst quenching. The problem with thirst quenching, when you have an institution type brand like Gatorade, it's very hard to break in, but they had essentially hired some of the top athletes in the world in order to promote the brand already. Brian Urlacher, David Ortiz, they had Kobe Bryant, all of these people. And the challenge with that was that going head-to-head against Gatorade meant that they were essentially trying to compete in a place where there was David and Goliath. So rather than do that, the simple brand strategy change was this. What if they drank Gatorade and Vitaminwater? So, they drink Gatorade when they're playing sports, but they drink Vitaminwater when they want to have game. So make it the drink that these ballplayers drink when they're out at night with their rap star friends and their girlfriends and their wives. Make it the social drink of the athlete. So, ball players drink Gatorade, but ballers drink Vitaminwater. It changed everything for them. 

Chris Powers: Okay, tell me your story about how the name Amazon came to be. Everybody knows Amazon. 

Krish Menon: So, the context of Amazon, the name, most people don't realize this. It's a very simple thing when you look at it. So, if you go to relentless.com right now, relentless.com will actually redirect to Amazon. And why does it redirect to Amazon? Because that was for a while, for a brief moment, the name that Jeff Bezos gave to Amazon. But as he was thinking about a brand that needed to be stronger and bigger, a conversation came up about what's the name that could actually be on it. And so the simple strategy to create Amazon was I want to sell everything from A to Z. So, you know that arrow under, what people think is a smiley face? It is actually not a smiley face. It's an arrow pointing from A to Z. I'm selling everything from A to Z. And then it was simply a question of words that would fit both A and Z. Arizona came up as an option, Amaze came up as an option, and Amazon came up. Amazon was trademarkable, and there you have it. 

Chris Powers: Okay, two more. How did you rebrand a company that makes home service loans Mr. Cooper? Like how do you get there? 

Krish Menon: How do you get there? Well, you need a really, really bold client. That's the first thing. You need a client that is willing to break all kinds of rules, and in our mutual friend, Kevin Dahlstrom, I had that. Kevin will really do anything. And that's the beauty of having a client like Kevin, because he will do anything. So, fun story, the original name that we had given Nationstar, which is the company that he was running. Nationstar, by the way, was a servicing, mortgage servicing company. They didn't do originations and they were wanting to do originations. But the problem was the servicing side of the business was so badly reviewed everywhere, Nationstar as a brand had terrible negative equity in the- so they needed a fresh start. So, I really said, look, getting to the great American dream, which is owning a home, is one of the biggest nightmares that people actually have. So, the entire process of buying a home makes everything really, really, really bad. Mortgages are hard to get to, the entire title process, working with people, all of it's terrible. But what if we could actually take the one thing that people worry about, the mortgage part, and make it a little bit more human-centric? So that became the strategy for Nationstar. But then we needed a name that reflected that. And so my theory was let's actually bring- let's make this one person. Let's make the entire company a person. And so we called it Mr. Jones. That's what the original name was. But then trademark-wise Edward Jones became an issue. And so we couldn't do that because of the financial services space. And so, this was a last minute change where I needed a name, and two things came to mind. I wanted a name that would be both- I didn't want the name to be too white, I didn't want the name to be too ethnic. I wanted the name just to be general. And growing up, I read Archie comics, and Betty's last name, Betty and Veronica, Betty's last name is Cooper. And so I've always loved that name, Cooper. And then when I first moved to the US, I started watching a TV show called Hanging with Mr. Cooper. And it was about this... It was this cool Black teacher that everyone loved. And there was this- so there's this juxtaposition of the whitest comic book in the world, Archie Comics, combined with this really cool kind of Black centric show called Hanging with Mr. Cooper, and I said, hey, here's the name that comes together. So I called Kevin at five in the morning one day, and I said, dude, I think I have it. Let's call it Mr. Cooper. He said, I hate that name. That's the worst name I've ever heard. And then eventually it grew on him, and the rest is history. 

Chris Powers: Okay, real quick on that note, because we've talked about this a lot, how often do you kind of have to commit and then kind of like love the brand after you've committed? Like how often is it that you're like a thousand percent this is the greatest thing versus it's like it's amazing, but you really fall in love with it over time? 

Krish Menon: So most of the time. When a name doesn't come from you as a founder or as an entrepreneur, it is very hard to accept it as something that you want to do. Every now and then, you'll get exceptionally close to something as a name that goes, oh my God, that's amazing. Like Katerina Schneider and the name Ritual. Ritual was instant. Oh, it feels- it's a great name, love that. Fatty15 was a name that we gave to Serafina Therapeutics that instantly they went, oh, that's cool. We love that name. But every now and then, that happens. But for the most part, you cannot love something until you get to know it. And I say this, how often do you meet someone and go, oh, my God, I want to live with them for the rest of my life. I love you. You don't. You get to know them. So why would you assume that you would fall in love with a name right away? You don't fall in love with anything right away. The only thing people fall in love with right away are puppies. And I think that if- and if you can find a puppy name, that's great. But that doesn't happen all the time. 

Chris Powers: I don't know if there's a company out there called Puppy. Maybe there is. I've never heard of it. Maybe there's a name right there. All right, we're going to end on three beliefs. Familiar is failure. Is that the same notion of being indifferent and just walking by? 

Krish Menon: Yeah, familiar is failure is this idea that when something is familiar, people tend to ignore it. And more often than not, creating unfamiliarity requires a person to stop, take in that thing, and ask a question, which is all you want a person to do if you're asking the person to do that at the right place at the right time. So, familiar is failure is just a context that says that any time- which is why when you hire a firm and it says, hey, we're in financial services, so we want to look like this, and then they make you look like everything else. That familiarity, people call it the sea of sameness, is a death knell. There's so many companies whose websites you can take and you can swap the logos and you would not know the difference. And that's another problem. 

Chris Powers: Well, somebody put that up on Twitter the other day, it's like every brand now is using the same font, it's like all black. Like why are all tech brands devolving to look like- when I think of like the Uber brand, it's like everything looks like Uber now. 

Krish Menon: Yeah, and part of the reason they're doing that is people follow trends. Second, I have to be honest with you, and this is a little rant that I'll make about the design business. We're losing great designers. We are losing the ability for people to understand and learn. Gen Z designers are not great. They don't take the time to understand true design. They're learning too quickly from the internet. They're using YouTube to figure out what to do, but they're not putting real design thinking against what they're doing. By the way, I'm not saying this about everybody, but I'm saying in general what's out there. And so in the absence of having original thought for design, what people are doing is copying what they think is good and beautiful. And so everything is starting to look like the same. 

Chris Powers: Revelations not observations. 

Krish Menon: Observations are when you go and look at a market, look at a product line, look at a category and go, this is what's happening and therefore I should act in this way. And 90% of brands and companies use observations to make business decisions. I see that the sales of masks are rising, let's create a mask company. That is an observation. The problem with observations is that everybody else can see them. When everybody else can see them, what's the problem? What's the challenge with that? It means that everybody else can do what you're doing. So when you base a business off of observations, you end up creating highly, easily enterable market that you can essentially be in. If you base it off of revelations, which is looking at the observations and coming up with a twist that nobody else has thought of, then you're essentially creating a market for yourself and you're using a revelation that only you have an insight into that allows you to actually have some kind of competitive moat around you. And that's the reason. 

Chris Powers: Can you give an example real quick of a company that did that? 

Krish Menon: Let's actually take the company I just talked about, Ritual. Ritual is a great example. Katerina Schneider looked at the women's market of vitamins and realized that there were lots of vitamins but no vitamins just for women. Now, it would have been super easy to go, I'm creating a brand of vitamins just for women, but she didn't stop there. This is what she did. The revelation she came up with is that the vitamins that women were taking now had 200 more ingredients than it needed to. And she worked with really hardcore scientists to figure out whether or not there were only a few ingredients that women needed in order to actually have a great day. And she found nine ingredients. And then she said, I want to make the nine ingredients visible. So she created a pellet where there were nine pellets inside your capsule. And each of the pellets was one of the actual- and they were all transparent. Each of the pellets was the ingredient. So, when you were looking at the vitamin, you literally saw the nine ingredients you were taking. Beautiful idea. And then instead of calling it women's vitamins, she called it Ritual. Because it's a ritual that you're starting. And instead of starting with nine or ten products, she started with one. Changed everything. Like the fastest growing vitamin company in the world. 

Chris Powers: Okay, real quick on that note, is it not good to start a brand that's just named after one product because you might stymie yourself? Like if you called yourself like basketball, you probably couldn't sell footballs at some point. 

Krish Menon: I'll give you an actual example that I had to fix for my friend. If he's listening, Ben, you're welcome. There was a company called Theragun. Do you remember this? 

Chris Powers: Yeah, I got one in my office right now. 

Krish Menon: Great. Yeah. Theragun, built it, went out. Great. Then they got bought by private equity. And then they're like, hey, we need to add another product. What do we do? But the thing is called Theragun. How many Theraguns can you add? So we had to go through an entire exercise where we renamed the company Therabody, and Theragun became one of the products. And now they have TheraOne, which is a- So they have all of these Thera somethings under it, but it was an architectural challenge when they started with calling company Theragun. But to be fair, when the person, the founder started the company, he probably said, I'm starting a... He created a product. He didn't create a brand. And then the brand came out of the product. 

Chris Powers: Actions, not ads. 

Krish Menon: So, if you're a brand or an entrepreneur or a founder or a company right now and you're listening to this and you have a marketing budget, you probably are trying to figure out how to get your potential customer to you by activating their marketing budget. And you probably hire a little agency or a big agency depending on the size you are and they're creating messaging for you. They're creating messaging for you that's based off of all of this research that's been done. Our product does this, this is the benefit, this is the reason to believe, and here's how we craft it, and here's the creative way we do it. Some people will do it with digital marketing, some people will do it with advertising, all great. The problem with advertising by itself is that it doesn't actually solve the core need that people need to feel in your product. If you think about the greatest brands of the past five to ten years, most of them have built themselves up not through advertising, but through actions by creating new things that people can do and then advertising those actions. So, I'll give you an example. Imagine a world where Uber doesn't exist. And I come to you and go, hey dude, I have an idea. I need you to find me a couple million dollars for this. You do funding, and this is what I want you to do. Imagine your daughter's just finished college, but she's in college, but she goes to a bar, and she uses a fake ID, and she's kind of drunk at the end of the night. I have a thing where a guy can just pick her up and take her back home. He might show up in a Honda, he show up in a Civic. You have no idea who he is, but he's going to take her home, and she's going to be drunk. You are going to literally kick me out of the room. That is Uber. That is Uber. Uber is some random dude picking up your daughter in the middle of the night to take her home when she's drunk. But we don't think about Uber that way. And that, the actions that Uber took to create that trust, that notion, that's what they advertise. So that's why I talked about actions. 

Chris Powers: I'm not kidding you. I got in an Uber the other night and this dude had a gasoline tank and a rope, not in the trunk, in the backseat sitting with me. I was like, holy shit. Krish, this was awesome. I think you were one of the most talented people. It was unbelievable to get to chat with you today and really appreciate it. 

Krish Menon: Thanks for having me on, buddy.