Dodo Pizza: Beyond the Founder’s Charisma

When the Leader Leaves the Stage

In 2023, Dodo Pizza reached a strategic milestone: its founder, Fyodor Ovchinnikov, stepped away from operational management. For more than a decade, he had launched products, managed teams, and served as the brand’s main communicator, shaping its rhetoric, style, and public image. This is a typical situation for companies whose identity is built around a personality. In sociology, Max Weber called it the “charismatic type of legitimacy.”

In a marketing context, it is known as a founder-led identity. The challenge is that such brands are difficult to scale. When the leader leaves the spotlight, the strategic task becomes how to preserve trust and coherence, not through personal presence, but through a systematic brand architecture.

The Pressure of New Markets

At the same time, the business was expanding rapidly into new territories — from the CIS to Africa. This created additional pressure on the brand: local adaptations were happening chaotically, tone of voice was getting lost, product roles were blurring, and semi-independent sub-brands were emerging.

The central question was clear: how to ensure the resilience and recognizability of Dodo without relying on a single charismatic leader?

An Audit That Revealed Inner Strength

We began with a full brand audit. It was important to hear Dodo both from the inside and the outside: how customers perceive it across different markets and how it is experienced by the people who build it every day. The research revealed something unexpected: despite the variety of external expressions, the brand remained remarkably cohesive internally. Teams were living by the same values and moving in unison, but they lacked a shared language to express this outwardly.

Living Through Several Futures

Next, we invited the company to experience multiple alternative futures. Instead of long reports, we worked through scenarios and prototypes. Together with the team, we tested hypotheses, from fully shifting toward “results” to models that preserved curiosity as the brand’s cultural core. The task was not just to invent new wording but to check how these ideas performed across product development, marketing, and HR communications.

FANATIC acted as a partner helping the company make choices based on the real viability of ideas in daily practice.

When the Platform Becomes a Tool

From the chosen strategy, we built the final platform. It is rooted in internal culture, scalable across a multinational network, aligned with both product and franchising logic, and applicable in marketing as well as management. The platform ceased to be an abstract slogan and became an operational tool.

It underpinned the refreshed visual identity, ensured communication consistency across markets, synchronized local teams with the center, and strengthened the company’s positioning without dependence on a single leader.

A New Language for the Team

Today this system operates on every level: from visual identity to operational unity across franchises. A brand that once spoke with the voice of Fyodor Ovchinnikov now speaks with the voice of the team itself. We did not “invent” a new brand, we just helped it remember itself and find the form that allows it to move forward.

Strategic Takeaway

This case illustrates an important shift not only for Dodo but for the entire category. In fast-growing networks, the founder’s emotional energy can be a powerful starting impulse, but it must inevitably transform into a systematic architecture if the brand wants to grow beyond the individual. Dodo made this leap: it preserved its spirit but formalized it into a platform that unites teams, works across countries, and sets a new level of brand maturity.