Badster was built to repel as many people as it attracts — and that was the strategy
Bucharest, January 2016
For an Eastern European drinks group, Brandient created an energy drink with attitude to spare. The target was young and mostly male, chasing a feeling of “unreasonable freedom,” and the whole brand had to burst from the restrictive real estate of a single 250 ml can. The name came self-ironic and self-explanatory, and presented itself: Badster.
“The furious explosion of wilderness on the can comes literally from within, bursting through the B monogram, carved out as a jinxing number 13. The toughest challenge was to treat the brand's payload of extremes in a cool, neo-noir graphic novel look and feel.”
—Cristian Petre, Partner, Design Director, Brandient
Brand manifestations proliferate the same sardonic appeal in both visual applications and brand rhetoric: “No bull. No sh*t”, “Life’s a dog”, “No sugar talk added.” — see www.badster.com for more.
If you enjoy the view, things click into place forever — if you don’t, you are probably not of much interest to the brand. This makes the can a pretty cool segmentation instrument.
For more details, please see the Badster case study.
Brandient is the award-winning brand strategy and design company, with offices in Bucharest and Singapore. Find out more about us and about our work.
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 Badster
Badster, the Romanian energy drink created in 2014, was built on a deliberately polarizing strategy — an attitude brand, “More grrr in your blood,” carried from positioning through naming to the pack — designed to divide opinion and win its narrow audience: the Badster case.