What Zomato and Zepto Teach Technical Founders About Building a Brand People Remember

Source: Masters’ Union — Chandan Mendiratta, Chief Culture and Brand Officer at Zepto — Video ID: uOhVaUvRVPE

Great startup marketing is not decoration applied after product-market fit. It is the discipline of shaping memory, behavior, and trust while the market is still deciding what a category should mean.

Who Is Chandan Mendiratta?

Chandan Mendiratta is Chief Culture and Brand Officer at Zepto, an IIT Delhi and ISB alum, and a former brand, growth, and culture leader at Zomato and Classplus. His work spans Zomato’s 500-city expansion, Zepto’s purple-led brand system, viral campaigns with Akshay Kumar and NTR, and quick-commerce category expansion across groceries, electronics, apparel, beauty, and more.

His path is not the classic packaged-goods marketer’s ladder. He started in consulting at Deloitte in 2004, moved into financial derivatives trading at Futures First for five and a half years, spent three years in campus branding and recruiting, moved to Bombay to start a production house, joined a holiday startup, then Zomato, Classplus, and Zepto. That sequence matters because his marketing lessons were forged in high-growth chaos: launches, category shifts, product ambiguity, team building, customer psychology, and creative risk.

The Best Startup Marketers Are Not Always “Career Marketers”

Chandan’s strongest marketing lesson begins with humility. When he first took over marketing at Zomato around 2020, the people reporting to him knew more about marketing than he did. His response was not posturing. It was honesty: “I don’t know. I will learn it from you. You will teach me.”

“There’s nothing you can’t do.”

That mindset is more useful to a founder than a library of frameworks. A technical founder does not need to become a polished brand marketer overnight. But a founder does need to become curious about why people remember, trust, share, and repeatedly choose one product over another.

Chandan’s career also shows why startups reward generalists with taste and nerve. He did not become effective because every step on the résumé neatly compounded. He became effective because he kept stepping into ambiguous rooms and asking what outcome had to happen next.

Right Place, Right Time: TAM Is Not Enough

Chandan defines “right place, right time” with unusual clarity. Right place is defined by TAM. Right time is defined by how early the company is in that journey.

When he joined Zomato in 2018, food delivery was still early for the company. Zomato had roughly 20% market share, while Swiggy had about 80%. The Zomato app still carried the hangover of restaurant discovery: users had to tap “order food online” before entering the delivery flow. A few months later, food delivery became the default landing experience.

That small UI detail captures a major strategic shift. Zomato was not just buying demand; it was repositioning the product around the behavior it wanted to own.

The same timing logic applied to Zepto. Quick commerce was young, the market was expanding, and the company had room to define not just grocery delivery, but the mental model of “anything in 10 minutes.”

For founders, the lesson is not merely “pick a big market.” It is more specific: pick a market where the user’s default behavior is still being written. The earlier you are in shaping that behavior, the more brand, product, and GTM can compound together.

Ownership Means Nothing Is Outside Your Scope

Chandan’s Zomato 500-city launch experience is one of the strongest operating lessons. He led the team that launched Zomato in 500 cities, but many of the necessary pieces were not neatly assigned: product issues, GTM problems, stakeholder gaps, and execution details all became his responsibility.

“Don’t just be confined to what you’re given to do.”

He describes startup ownership as doing “whatever it takes,” even when the work sits beyond the job description. It also requires the ability to motivate people who do not report to you and may not be naturally motivated to fix the thing you need fixed.

That is a practical definition of founder’s mindset. Not motivational language. Not a poster. The skill is cross-functional force multiplication: getting product, design, ops, marketing, and sales to converge around the outcome even when no single function owns the entire problem.

In B2B startups, this is especially true. A GTM problem may look like a messaging problem, but actually be a demo problem. A demo problem may be a product onboarding problem. A product onboarding problem may be an ICP problem. The founder has to be willing to follow the friction wherever it lives.

The Rise of the Right-Brain Marketer

Chandan argues that marketing has historically favored left-brain operators: analytical, structured, agency-managing brand managers who define the brief and let an outside agency write the script. But that model is changing.

He calls the next wave the rise of the right-brain marketer: someone closer to a creator, writer, and cultural observer than a traditional campaign manager.

Zomato wrote a lot of content in-house. Zepto has pushed this further. Chandan says Zepto wrote all its recent films in-house, including 20 to 30 films produced over three to four months. The Akshay Kumar and NTR campaign was written internally by three or four people sitting in a room over multiple days.

“The marketer would never write a script. I think that’s how the industry is going to move.”

This is a major lesson for startups with limited budgets. In-house creativity is not just cheaper. It is faster, closer to the product, and more likely to capture the weird details customers actually care about.

For a technical product, the best campaign ideas may not come from an agency. They may come from watching engineers rage-click through flaky tests, reading GitHub comments, studying CI failure threads, or noticing how frontend teams talk in Slack when a deploy breaks.

Color Is Not Decoration. It Is Mental Real Estate.

One of Zepto’s most deliberate brand moves was going all-in on purple. Chandan says that when he joined, Zepto creatives used many different colors. He pushed the team toward one dominant system: “only purple.”

The goal was not aesthetic consistency for its own sake. The goal was ownership of a visual memory structure.

“Few years from now even if you look at a creative, you don’t see the brand, it’s Zepto.”

He points to Zomato’s red as the equivalent. Zomato’s delivery partners wear red jerseys seen many times during the day: on roads, in buildings, at doorsteps. Every sighting becomes unpaid recall.

“If you can remind people of your brand without having to spend money on it and it happens every day, multiple times a day, that’s marketing dollars saved.”

Color also carries positioning. Purple signals premium, royalty, and luxury. Red and yellow signal aggression, brightness, and energy. Zepto’s Super Saver property uses a greenish secondary identity because affordability needs to stand apart from the premium Zepto master brand without breaking the system.

The key is not to pick a “nice” color. The key is to make a consistent strategic bet until the market cannot unsee it.

People Should Be Able to Say: “I’m a Zepto Kind of Guy”

Chandan uses a simple overheard line to explain brand affinity. At CyberHub, he heard someone say, “I’m a Nike kind of a guy.”

That sentence is the destination. Nike, Adidas, and Puma may sell similar materials and similar categories, but people attach identity to one brand’s message, ethos, and signals.

“The core job of a marketer [is] to make people fall in love with your brand and say, ‘I’m a Zepto kind of a guy.’”

This matters because mature markets often converge functionally. In quick commerce, everyone can eventually offer similar SKUs, similar delivery times, and similar discounts. When products converge, the brand becomes a sorting mechanism.

In software, the same thing happens. AI features get copied. Browser automation gets benchmarked. Test coverage claims blur together. The winning product is not only the one with better features; it is the one users feel represents how they want to work.

Earned Media Is the New Performance Lever

Chandan’s sharpest marketing principle is that modern brands must think like content creators. Twenty or thirty years ago, an ad lived on TV and could not easily be shared. Today, the question is different:

“What would make people share this? What would make people talk about it?”

That is earned media: when customers talk about the brand voluntarily. Chandan calls it “a beautiful thing” because it saves marketing dollars and adds credibility. A paid ad can reach someone, but a friend sharing a screenshot in WhatsApp carries more trust.

Zepto designs for this behavior in small physical and digital surfaces: event flyers that people want to share, boxes and bags that “weave a story,” Women’s Day “chill lady” cards designed so men could send them to women in their lives and women could share them with friends, and campaigns that invite screenshots, opinions, jokes, and debate.

One audience member described her mother, normally a low-involvement consumer, calling her into the room on Women’s Day to show a Zepto bag and scan an interactive cartoon with “a huge smile.” That is the gold standard: a tiny brand surface becoming a family moment.

For startups, earned media does not have to mean a viral billboard. It can mean creating product moments users naturally screenshot: a surprisingly accurate bug report, a hilarious but useful test failure explanation, a before-and-after diff that makes an engineer look smart in front of their team.

Campaigns Should Move Either Brand or Behavior

Zepto’s “make soan papdi great again” campaign was not just a joke. It changed category behavior. Chandan says that for several years, the top sweet SKUs were usually laddoo first, kaju katli second, and soan papdi third. After the campaign, soan papdi became the number one selling sweet on Zepto, followed by laddoo and kaju katli.

That is the bar: a campaign can be funny, but it should still move memory, search, orders, category adoption, or frequency.

Chandan contrasts this with a Zomato campaign from July 2021 featuring Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif. The film showed a rider arriving at Hrithik Roshan’s door, being invited for a selfie, but leaving because another order came in. It looked slick: slow motion, high FPS, strong music, great visuals. But Chandan says it failed because it was not solving a clear problem.

“Why are we doing this? If the objective is not defined, you’re bound to fail.”

Worse, the internet interpreted it in ways Zomato did not intend: riders were so stressed they could not wait for a selfie; the brand did not respect riders; the “Jadoo” reference made riders seem alien. The message was layered, and layered messages are fragile in low-attention environments.

Another Zomato campaign tried to increase order frequency by assigning dishes to days of the week: Healthy Mondays, Dosa Tuesdays, Oriental Wednesdays, Italian Thursdays, Pizza Fridays, Biryani Saturdays, and Mughlai Sundays. The problem was confusion. Chandan’s rule is blunt:

“If you have to pick between showing one creative seven times or seven creatives one time each, always go with former.”

He notes that it takes four or five impressions for a viewer to register the message. Founders should take this seriously. Cleverness that requires explanation is usually too expensive.

Do Not Try to Change the Customer’s Worldview

One of Chandan’s most useful positioning principles is this:

“People don’t change their worldview. As a marketer, don’t try to change their worldview. Think of your message that can support their worldview.”

He applies this to Zepto’s Super Saver campaign. Many Indian families attach meaning to offline grocery shopping: family time, pushing a cart through the aisle, a Sunday ritual, the feeling of being smart about prices. Instead of attacking that behavior directly, Zepto’s campaign plays with FOMO and price comparison.

Akshay Kumar was chosen deliberately. For a Super Saver affordability proposition, Zepto needed someone older consumers and parents would trust. Chandan asks: would a mother respect Akshay Kumar delivering that message, or Ranveer Singh? Younger consumers may prioritize convenience and YOLO behavior, but parents seek affordability. The celebrity had to be fun, trustworthy, old enough to plausibly order groceries, and respected by the buyer.

The GTM lesson is that a message should enter the customer’s existing belief system. If frontend engineers believe tests are flaky, slow, and painful, telling them “testing is fun now” may bounce. A stronger message supports their worldview: “Yes, browser testing is painful. That is exactly why Diffie catches visual and functional regressions before your users do.”

Halo Products Make the Whole Catalog Feel Bigger

Zepto’s category expansion has included unexpected partnerships and products: Decathlon, Manyavar, U.S. Polo, ENO, boAt headphones, Maybelline, Lakme, iPhones, iPads, AirPods, PlayStation, and MacBooks.

Not all of these are frequent purchases. That is partly the point. Chandan explains the “halo effect”: show something aspirational or surprising that is available on Zepto, and everything beneath it becomes easier to believe.

“If you show something aspirational that this is available on Zepto, everything under that is assumed that is available on Zepto.”

The Manyavar wedding campaign was misunderstood by some as “who orders a groom’s sherwani at the last minute?” Chandan clarifies that it was not about the groom ordering his sherwani. It was about baraatis who showed up in suits and needed appropriate wedding attire quickly. The absurdity made the point memorable.

The same logic applied to the car campaign. People believed Zepto might deliver a car in under 10 minutes, but the reveal was about test drives for Skoda Kylaq. The goal was hype, curiosity, and earned media, not actual car delivery. Chandan says they spent ₹0 on the Manyavar wedding hoarding, yet LinkedIn was full of it.

Halo marketing is powerful because it changes search behavior. Chandan says his job is to make people search for any SKU they want to buy on Zepto. After the shaadi campaign, there were fewer than 100 searches for terms like “shaadi” and “dulha,” which he treats as fun rather than core volume. The larger point was to stretch the boundary of what Zepto could mean.

Virality Is Not Vanity. It Reduces Cost Per Reach.

Chandan is clear that marketers crave virality because it has an economic function:

“Virality is nothing but earned media.”

When people talk about a campaign, the brand reaches more people than paid distribution alone would have allowed. That reduces cost per reach. It also creates a social proof loop: if LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, and office conversations are full of the campaign, the brand feels culturally larger than its media budget.

But the virality has to connect to a strategic point. Zepto is not being random for randomness’ sake. The car campaign stretched the 10-minute association. The Manyavar campaign stretched assortment. Super Saver stretched the convenience-plus-affordability promise. Purple stretches recall. Each creative bet ladders back to a brand or business objective.

UI/UX Is Brand, Not Just Product

When asked whether Blinkit’s interface being perceived as better could weaken Zepto’s marketing, Chandan did not dismiss the premise. He said UI plays a huge role in eventual market share.

But he also made an important point about habit: people often prefer the interface they use most. Ola users once found Uber confusing; Uber users found Ola confusing. In South India, where Swiggy led, people found Zomato confusing. In North India, where Zomato led, people found Swiggy confusing.

Usage creates familiarity, and familiarity creates preference. Still, Chandan acknowledges that both Zepto and competitors have strong product teams, and Zepto continues to run dipsticks and improve the UI.

For startups, this is a reminder that product experience is part of positioning. If the interface contradicts the promise, marketing leaks. A product that claims speed but feels slow, claims intelligence but creates manual work, or claims reliability but hides errors will struggle to build trust.

Assortment, Retention, and the Expanding Job to Be Done

Zepto’s business promise is built on four pillars:

Chandan says assortment drives both first-time buyers and retention, because use cases change every day. The goal is simple: whatever the customer searches for should not be sold out or unavailable.

This is a strong GTM concept for software too. Acquisition often starts with one sharp wedge, but retention expands when the product solves adjacent problems in the same workflow. The trick is not to become vague. It is to expand from a trusted core into believable adjacent jobs.

Social Media Is Now a Core Marketing Skill

Chandan ends with a direct warning to future marketers: learn social media, especially LinkedIn.

His reasoning is practical. Premium customers are harder to reach through traditional channels. They may not watch TV. They may have YouTube Premium. They may only watch major cricket events like the Champions Trophy or IPL, where ads are expensive. So how do you reach them?

They are on Instagram, Snap, and especially LinkedIn. Chandan says LinkedIn matters because the premium audience consumes content there, and “influence flows top down.”

“Future marketers would be somebody who think like a content creator.”

He also gives a tactical LinkedIn insight: when he is personally in the picture, posts work better. “It’s not my face,” he says. It is true for everyone. When people put themselves personally out there, the world likes it.

For founders, this is not a call to become influencers for vanity. It is a call to build distribution literacy. The more you post, the more you learn what resonates, what gets ignored, what gets shared, and why.

Key Lessons for Founders and Operators

Why This Matters for Diffie

Diffie is not selling groceries in 10 minutes. It is selling confidence to frontend engineers: confidence that UI changes did not break the product, that browser flows still work, and that regressions can be caught before customers see them.

That makes Chandan’s lessons surprisingly relevant.

First, Diffie needs a memory system. Zepto chose purple so that even brandless creative could become recognizable. Diffie should make an equally deliberate choice around color, visual language, screenshots, diff views, failure states, and product surfaces. If engineers see a certain kind of before-and-after UI comparison, they should eventually think “that’s Diffie.”

Second, Diffie should market from the engineer’s existing worldview. Frontend teams already believe browser testing is brittle, slow, flaky, and painful to maintain. Do not fight that belief. Use it. The message should not be “testing is easy now” in a generic way. It should be closer to: “Yes, frontend regressions are painful. Diffie finds the visual and functional breaks your test suite misses.”

Third, Diffie can use halo use cases. Zepto uses iPhones, MacBooks, Manyavar, and car test drives to make the catalog feel expansive. Diffie can use high-stakes frontend examples the same way: checkout flows, pricing pages, onboarding funnels, design system migrations, auth flows, and AI-generated code changes. If Diffie can handle the scariest UI regressions, users will assume it can handle the routine ones.

Fourth, earned media should be built into the product. Zepto’s bags, cards, hoardings, and campaigns are shareable by design. Diffie’s equivalent is the shareable artifact: a crisp regression report, a visual diff that instantly explains the bug, a CI comment engineers want to paste into Slack, or a “caught before prod” story that makes the team look competent.

Fifth, founder-led content matters. Chandan’s LinkedIn advice applies directly to Diffie’s GTM. The audience — technical founders, frontend leads, engineering managers, and AI builders — is already on LinkedIn, GitHub, X, Hacker News, and engineering communities. Anand should not outsource all narrative creation. The founder’s point of view is part of the brand.

Sixth, repeat one message until it lands. Diffie should avoid the “seven creatives one time each” trap. Pick the core wedge: AI browser testing for frontend engineers that catches regressions before users do. Then show it repeatedly through different concrete examples, not through constantly changing positioning.

Finally, UI/UX is the brand. For Diffie, the product interface is not separate from GTM. The dashboard, test setup, failure explanation, CI integration, and diff visualization are the brand experience. If the product claims to reduce frontend QA pain, every step of setup and every report must feel like relief.

The practical takeaway: Diffie should not try to “do marketing” as a layer on top of the product. The marketing should emerge from the product’s most screenshot-worthy moments, the founder’s sharpest beliefs, a consistent visual system, and a GTM motion that respects how engineers already think about testing pain.