Brandient is the award-winning brand strategy and design company with offices in Bucharest and Singapore. With a proven track record in difficult markets, Brandient delivers innovative branding solutions for the emergent entrepreneurs and companies.
Aneta Bogdan founded Brandient in 2002 — together with Cristian Kit Paul and Mihai Bogdan — and she has been the Managing Partner of the company ever since.
With hundreds of innovative brand projects under her lead over 26 years of Eastern (European) rock’n’roll, Aneta advocates branding and design as invaluable business and reputation tools, creating and revitalizing entrepreneurial, corporate and institutional brands in emerging environments. Her forte is finding patterns where others see chaos, which comes in handy when clients pop up with unsolvable problems. She is never average: cynical and idealistic, authoritarian and inspirational, a fresh, break-the-rules storyteller with a speculative and passionate discourse.
I must confess that 16 years ago, when I founded Brandient, I tricked myself into thinking, “This will be my short-term, personal entrepreneurial project, we’ll exit in seven years tops!” But as time went by — financial collapse aside — something very engaging happened to me: I started to slowly fall in love with the profession of brand consultancy. This sentiment grew steadily, and it did so while I was building, together with my two founding business partners, quite an “interesting” business model: an economic entity which esteems the spirit of merit. I like to say that Brandient is a special mastery, delivering above and beyond the skills of the trade. We have created our own small universe in Bucharest where we dare to dare, to experiment, to question almost everything about branding. Eventually, we realized to what extent a post-communist, transformative society can not only challenge but enrich the already established recipes of the Western school of branding. As a result, we set out to replicate our insights in Singapore five years ago, with like-minded clients and collaborators.
Having lived in Eastern Europe both before and after the fall of communism, and having worked for the Eastern European markets (in Romania, Poland, Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Moldavia), I’ve witnessed first hand the perverting power of the communist ideology, and how aggressively it still affected the social and economic behavior of people — decades after the reinstate of a free market. Countries with little in common from an anthropological point of view would display an almost identical type of post-communist behavior and mentality — in the way they would deal with ideas of freedom, prosperity, consumerism, competition, etc.
Working for entrepreneurs in the emergent South-East Asia, I couldn’t help but notice so many similarities with Eastern Europe – but this time on the positive side of transcending human values! I can easily relate to Asian entrepreneurs’ incredible endurance, determination, and courage to build companies in difficult socio-economic contexts, and I understand their fixation on accessing great education as well as their craving for recognition and respect (not fame!). This is exactly the context and type of behaviour we experience in Eastern Europe, and I have developed a tacit skill at identifying an Easterner in a crowd– attributable to our common, empathetic feel, our eagerness to pay attention, to learn and to understand, and above all, our tolerance in dealing with far from clear situations.
I am grateful to have built a strong team of professionals that share our guiding ethos and do not flinch from the unfamiliar or the arduous.