YTL Foundation
Casting education as the multiplier of a nation’s strength
YTL Foundation is the philanthropic and education arm of YTL Group, one of Malaysia’s largest conglomerates — a builder of infrastructure, utilities and hotels whose operations reach from Kuala Lumpur and Singapore to Britain. Since 1997 the Foundation has put the group’s resources behind a single conviction: that education is the basis on which a society progresses. By 2020 it had built a portfolio of real substance — Frog Classrooms turning school classrooms across the country into modern learning spaces, the 54C Learning Space, university scholarships, the Acumen Fellowship for social innovators. What it lacked was not substance but position. In a field crowded with corporate foundations making similar institutional claims, its initiatives read as separate acts of generosity rather than as one institution with a point of view on where education must go.
That is a business problem, not a communications problem. A foundation competes for something scarcer than money: the conviction of policymakers, educators, partners and the group’s own people. Without a governing idea, even a well-funded portfolio remains invisible — and the standing the Foundation brought to Brandient as its ambition, to be recognized as a thought leader in the future of education, stays out of reach. The brief was to entrench that standing and to set the Foundation apart not through institutional claims, but through genuine, human stories.
The brand idea Brandient developed is education beyond schooling. The world has changed at a pace schooling has not kept up with: systems still built to pass exams no longer equip children for a world whose jobs are yet to be invented. The Foundation’s purpose is to challenge that — to redefine education around the skills that truly matter: creativity, critical thinking and collaboration. The idea did architectural work as much as rhetorical work: it framed the portfolio as one ecosystem in which each initiative multiplies the others, so the Foundation speaks with one voice across everything it funds.
From that platform Brandient wrote the Foundation’s brand narrative and its brand image film. The narrative casts education as a multiplier of a nation’s strength: just as YTL Group’s strength rests on people coming together, the Foundation’s impact compounds with every child it reaches — the group credo, 'Building the right thing', carried into the Foundation’s own mandate of 'Building the right future'. The Foundation is not adjacent to the group’s story; it is the same story, told in the future tense. The idea is held by one memorable image: a single pencil snaps easily, but a bundle of pencils will not break. The film follows that conviction child by child — a kindergartner who dreams of becoming a cosmonaut, a girl who wants to build bridges, a future biotech researcher, a young Acumen Fellow — each dream made possible by a sum of education initiatives reinforcing one another.
Reality tested the idea almost immediately. Weeks into the engagement, the pandemic closed Malaysia’s schools, and the Foundation moved learning into homes at national scale — free data, devices and lessons for families who would otherwise have been cut off. Education beyond schooling stopped being a positioning statement and became the Foundation’s operating reality. That is what a governing idea is for: programs change, crises come, and the institution still knows — and shows — exactly what it stands for.
Client:
YTL Foundation
Industry:
Social Impact, Culture and Education
Project type:
Brand Consultancy Specific Solutions
Date:
2020
Services:
Brand Positioning, Brand Name, Narratives and Voice, Communication Design
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