How a business grows after hitting the ceiling: Davyd Gviniashvili on the Kliati Marketolohy podcast

A new episode of the Ukrainian business podcast «Кляті маркетологи» (Kliati Marketolohy), made in partnership with Projector Institute, is out. The guest is Davyd Gviniashvili, co-founder of DOGMA. Before DOGMA, Davyd was CMO at the Ultragroup and Euroline holdings, responsible for marketing Levi’s, HUGO, BOSS and other brands across four markets. The episode is in Ukrainian.

Host Bohdan opened with a simple idea: a business needs a growth system. The whole conversation is about how to build one.

A growth system for business

DOGMA works as a strategic marketing partner and finds where a business can grow. The work has three parts:

• Research. Quantitative and qualitative surveys, brand tracking, mystery shopping, customer experience research.
• Strategy. Brand strategy, marketing strategy, go-to-market, brand identity.
• Delivery at CMO level. The DOGMA team steps into the business and leads the marketing launch, assembling agencies, freelancers or an in-house team for the task.

The most common request sounds like this: “We’ve hit the ceiling — how do we keep growing?” Growth can come from different places: a new market, a new product, new positioning or a better understanding of how customers live with the product.

“We look at the client’s business task. Very often it lies outside of what the client thinks they need.”

Davyd shared the story of a large European parts manufacturer. The company came for a brand identity. After an hour of conversation it became clear they needed a wider sales funnel and a stronger sales team — and that is what DOGMA advised.

Linking the business goal to marketing

A typical task is to connect the business goal with what happens in marketing channels. If a company plans to grow by $5M a year, it needs a breakdown of which products, audiences, markets and channels will deliver that growth, and which hypotheses to test first.

DOGMA owns the channel strategy: the team defines which channels the business goal needs and builds their management. The channels themselves are run by contractors or the client’s team.

Advertising campaigns that learn from data

In a creative partnership, DOGMA comes up with and delivers advertising campaigns for the client every month. The campaigns are built on research, audience insights and the brand’s creative platform. The films are generated with AI. After launch, the team reviews the results with the client and improves the next campaigns.

One example is VARUS.UA. For the World Cup, VARUS.UA ran collaborations with MHP, Oreo and Milka. The campaign brought +40% new users — see the VARUS.UA case. Another topic of the episode is an organic traffic channel with an AI avatar for Headway: in a month and a half it gained about 30K followers and 6M reach.

From CMO to founder

According to Davyd, the biggest change was the marketing budget. He used to manage $2M a year; his own business started from zero. The role changes too: a founder is responsible for marketing, sales, strategy and operations at once.

“It feels like a step back, because you move to a smaller scale. In fact it’s a step to the side: you simply take a different path.”

What helps to prepare for the move:

• Readiness for uncertainty. The first months may bring zero income.
• A financial cushion. Davyd recommends savings for about six months of living.
• A partner with different expertise. Davyd came from marketing and systems, Kiril Treitiak from design and creative. New solutions are born where the two views meet.

The main lesson of three years

DOGMA’s most painful mistake was a project without prepayment for a client they had worked with long and successfully. The client delayed payment and eventually disappeared: $6K never paid and the toughest negotiation of Davyd’s life. The team’s takeaway is simple: always take prepayment, ideally in full.

A marketer or a system

At the end, the host returned to the main question of the episode: hire one more marketer or build a growth system? Davyd’s answer is the system. It needs an owner who understands how to build it and links the business goal to every marketing step.

Watch the full episode in the player at the top of the page or on the Kliati Marketolohy YouTube channel.