Aneta Bogdan’s speech on the occasion of the launch — Tuesday, 21 November 2023, JW Marriott, Bucharest
Bucharest, November 2023 — On Tuesday, 21 November 2023, at the JW Marriott in Bucharest, COSR presented, before the presidents of all Romanian sports associations, the “Team Romania Emblem” designed by Brandient and approved by the International Olympic Committee.
Although we are progressing spectacularly at planetary level, it seems that fewer and fewer opportunities and positive events manage to bring us together — to gather all that is best in us, in human nature: talent, ambition, perseverance, respect, friendship, recognition, hope, and so on.
Over the past two decades, the Olympic Games have become humanity’s most exposed events globally, in participation and audience — we may call them “the greatest show on the planet” — with heroes, superpowers, with applause and sighs, and with tens and hundreds of millions (or even billions, in the case of the Games organized by China) of viewers. The last “show”, held during the pandemic, in Tokyo 2020, gathered 220 nations, and in Paris over 1 billion viewers are expected at the opening gala.
So it is no wonder that states, cities, governments, sponsors, commercial brands, organizations of all kinds see in the Olympic Games unique opportunities to make an impression, to create — or to change — a perception, to achieve an improvement of image, to sit better in the picture, as we say in branding.
In the new era of Olympism we have been living through in recent decades, the Olympic Games are regarded as nation-branding events, and the athletes — the ones who hold the power of the show — are true ambassadors, practically doing what we call sport diplomacy — diplomacy through sport — and I am not referring here only to performance and the success achieved, but also to the attitude and behaviour of the national teams, to the way they communicate and share their thoughts with fans on social media platforms, to the way they present themselves, through uniforms and equipment, and so on.
Over the past six months, we have worked together with the COSR team on a programme for the better signalling and performance of Romania’s image — through the opportunities offered by the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
We are pleased to announce a first success: the IOC’s approval of the first Team Romania commercial emblem — our country being among the few that managed to convince the international forum to approve such a project, alongside the USA, the UK, Germany and France.
The Team Romania Emblem will be found in all the manifestations of Romanian Olympism — on uniforms and sports equipment, alongside the Olympic insignia, in the communication in the Olympic Village, in media and social media communication, and also in a merchandising project that aims to create not only national and international engagement with Romania’s team, but also a potential source of revenue and direct funding for COSR.
The genesis of the emblem’s design was not easy — we are a nation that, unfortunately, thirty years after communism, is still exploring its identification with certain values and graphic representations able to offer comfort and national consensus at the level of belonging and unity.
The design of the Team Romania Emblem is based on two elements of identification that define our national identity:
- an authentic folk visual motif, defining for the aesthetics of the Romanian ia — the traditional blouse;
- an element that defines the Romanian contribution to the universal cultural heritage: Brâncuși’s avant-garde and emblematic sculpture, the Endless Column.
As details: in December 2022, UNESCO added the Romanian ia to the list of the universal intangible cultural heritage — a recognition that goes beyond the French cultural horizon (with Henri Matisse’s celebrated painting “La Blouse Roumaine” or Yves Saint Laurent’s inspirations for his collections); as for Brâncuși, this icon of universal art, we are aware that, like it or not, we share his fame with France, his adoptive country.
Moreover, if we look closely at this insignia, we will glimpse the outline of a heart — a heart that Romanian athletes celebrate when they sing the anthem, when they cry with happiness or… with disappointment.
Ne dorim ca Emblema Team Romania să devină un însemn al activismului pentru unitate și apartenență națională, să genereze simpatie și atractivitate în fața oricărei audiențe — și mai ales ne dorim ca această emblemă să susțină moralul, să dea încredere de sine și să devină un talisman purtător de noroc pentru Team Romania / L’Equipe de Roumanie / Echipa Olimpică a României.
—Aneta Bogdan, Brandient
“We want the Team Romania Emblem to become an insignia of activism for unity and national belonging, to generate sympathy and attractiveness before any audience — and above all we want this emblem to sustain morale, to give self-confidence, and to become a lucky-charm talisman for Team Romania / L’Equipe de Roumanie / Romania’s Olympic Team.”
About Brandient
Brandient is an independent brand strategy and design consultancy founded in Bucharest in 2002 by Aneta Bogdan, Cristian Kit Paul and Mihai Bogdan — never part of a global network, working directly for the owners, CEOs and boards of its clients, with an all-senior team and category exclusivity. In over two decades the firm has created or rebuilt more than 300 brands, 279 of them published as case studies at brandient.com/work — from Romania’s national leaders to brands carried worldwide. The firm has been active in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. The work has earned 84 international awards and distinctions — most recently a Red Dot (2025) and two Graphis Golds (2026) — 64 documented mentions in international design books and publications, and, in 2015, a place among the inaugural inductees of the REBRAND Hall of Fame, alongside Interbrand and MetaDesign.
About the Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee
The Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee (COSR) is the national Olympic committee — founded in 1914, carrying its present name since 2004 — the autonomous body responsible for Romania’s participation in the Olympic Games and for Team Romania, the brand under which its athletes compete. Brandient rebranded the committee in 2015 with a dual identity, institutional and marketing, and created the Team Romania commercial emblem in 2023–2024: the COSR case, the Team Romania case.