DASH’S GROWING-UP MESSAGING

We added this in our swipe file (despite kinda missing the wonky voice they had before) because it's such a good example of a brand broadening their messaging post-product market fit to grow. And it worked really, really, reallllly well. They sold 4.9 million cans in July 2025 alone. Saw a 74% uplift year on year. They're on track for £60m+ retail sales in 2026. So we think they'll cope with us missing their wonky voice.

What we love about this is that there's a lot of really clever thinking going on here.

Co-founder Jack Scott said in 2021 (three years before this campaign): "We didn't think that the wonky message should be upfront. We're really proud of reducing food waste, but it's a secondary layer in our communications. It's a message that we think makes consumers more loyal to our brand... first and foremost, we're a great tasting drink that hopefully makes our consumers feel good about themselves."

Which is a really interesting thing to think about. There's your launch messaging that helps you find your OG customers and make them your biggest fans and advocates. And then there's your bigger messaging that's broader and designed to appeal to more people once you've established your brand.

Dash's wonky fruit story was always that first kind of messaging.

It was the thing that turned customers into advocates, gave early adopters something to believe in, something to tell their friends, something that makes them feel like they found a brand that just gets it.

That's exactly what early messaging should do.

But, at a certain point, the thing that makes your early adopters love you becomes the thing that makes strangers walk past you.

"Wonky fruit" requires the customer to already care about food waste. "Finally a drink to feel good about" lowers that barrier to entry, even if it's not quite as on-brand.

Most brands we chat to hit this ceiling after a while. Standing out and connecting with new customers becomes harder and harder as a market becomes more and more crowded.

Which means that sometimes your most interesting, differentiated, mission-driven story just doesn't land the same way it did for your OG customers.

Byron Sharp's research backs this up, too. Brands grow by reaching new customers, not by going deeper with existing ones.

And while we don't love the line "Finally a drink to feel good about", it speaks to people who want a healthy drink they can grab with their meal deal in a way that creates a much bigger pool than "people who care about food waste".

And the wonky stuff isn't gone. It's on the can, on the website, in the brand's DNA.

But it's a retention message now, not an acquisition message.

So if your brand is seeing less and less traction with messaging that used to go gang-busters, it might be worth asking if you're hitting that ceiling of OG customers. Is it time to broaden your messaging? If so, ask yourself: what's the bigger truth your early messaging was getting at? How can you make that your message? Wonky fruit was a great, but under the hood it was always about feeling good about drinking Dash. They'd just never said it like that. So their evolution feels consistent to who they were before. When we helped Beachbum last year, the same thing happened. Their messaging was about paddleboarding and going to the beach. We kept that, but made it so that it was about a love of getting outdoors. Same brand DNA. Same core message. It just gets a bit bigger and broader. So, what's your version of that bigger but same message?