How a brand adds value

Why does one candy sell for UAH 20 and another for UAH 180?

Two candies can have nearly the same ingredients, yet one costs 20 hryvnias and the other 180. People buy the first one to eat it. They buy the second to give to someone they love. With Raffaello, a person buys both the sweet and the gesture.

In a Wizeclub lecture, DOGMA co-founder and creative director Kiril Treitiak showed how a brand creates that difference and why the logo comes late in the process.

A brand starts with strategy

Before drawing anything, you need to understand three things: the product, the market and the consumer. What is genuinely strong about the product? What is happening in the market, and what ground have competitors already taken? What do people want, what do they fear, and why do they pick one product over another?

The brand essence emerges where these answers intersect. From it come the positioning, character, values and everything else that should guide the company’s decisions.

There is one more important step between strategy and design: the metaphor. An abstract idea has to become an image that designers and copywriters can work with. Only then does the identity appear: logo, color, typefaces, tone of voice and the other elements people recognize the brand by.

And then all of it has to be implemented

Even a good brand book loses its value if it stays a file in a folder. The brand has to show up consistently in advertising, the product, the website, social media, physical spaces and service. If the website speaks in one voice, Instagram in another and the sales assistant in a third, the brand falls apart.

So the logic goes: business → analysis → brand essence → platform → metaphor → identity → implementation

When you start with the logo and invent the meaning afterwards, the order is reversed. This is exactly why people can pay much more for a product that is physically almost identical to another. They buy the product itself and the meaning the brand has built around it.