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Friday, May 13, 2005

The Brandient Myth

In 2002, a new company emerged on the advertising & branding market in Romania. It is called Brandient and they promoted themselves as being a Branding company. Not an advertising agency, not a design shop but a Branding company.

They did some remarkable things along the time and everybody looks up to them. I can say they are regarded as gurus in their industry, the top company you can go to when having a branding issue.

But is all this image behind Brandient really true? Are they the most inspired, most creative, most strategic on the market? Do they make mistakes? Well, everybody does, at some point....

I was very surprised a couple of days ago when one of my colleagues, Alex, saw the ASTRAL logo and had a great idea. After a quick search, the mistery revealed...the Astral logo strikingly resembles the France Telecom logo. And Astral just went through a rebranding process a while ago.

So, what happened? Is it just a mistake? Just a designer that came with a great idea about the logo and forgot he saw it somewhere else? Did Astral requested Brandient to do something so similar to the French company?

Don't get me wrong....I don't want to spoil the Brandient image....just that I don't believe in myths.

Here are the two logos. Judge for yourself. Also, here is Alex's opinion.

It seems to me that they just rotated the France Telecom logo, did some minor modifications and that was it. The lines look very much alike, they used the 2 color idea and the shape is obviously similar.

And this is not the end. There are other brands that are believed to be quite similar to well known brands from abroad. We will do some more investigations and come back with the details.

Posted by Mihai : 5/13/2005 03:23:00 pm