Brandient offers its pro-bono creative services to “Donate for the 1st Line” (Donează pentru Linia 1), the public donation campaign rallying top brands eMAG, Bitdefender, Banca Transilvania and Mobexpert behind Romania’s Covid-19 health effort
Bucharest, June 2020
Brand Solidarity: The New Engagement Protocol
In these times of uncertainty and social experimentation, it has been reassuring to see that brands have the capacity to rapidly adapt and cover at least part of the crisis-coping needs. What strikes as encouraging and — dare we say — even hopeful, is to see, around the planet, some excellent private sector social initiatives that prove brands are truly capable to “walk the talk”.
In Romania, collaborations such as D1 (Donează pentru Linia 1 / Donate for the 1st line) — which rallied initial substantial contributions from top brands eMAG (see case), Bitdefender (see case), Banca Transilvania (see case) and Mobexpert towards a public donation campaign supporting the Covid-19 health effort of the country — showed us that this could be an efficient approach. Brandient was excited to be part of this project by offering its pro-bono creative services to support the initiative. The campaign has raised impressive amounts for the cause, and everyone was pulled together by an invisible force — the power of true brand solidarity, proven by a group of exquisite top brands.
In Malaysia, YTL Group (see Geneco case) was a true catalyser of social support by developing a nation-wide programme aiming to aid the educational effort during the pandemic, creating the Learn from Home initiative through YTL Foundation and partners Frog Asia, Yes and the National University of Malaysia.
This is a precious lesson we can take out: as idealist as it may sound, given the over-use of the phrase, maybe it is solidarity for the common good that we should engage, as a tool to ensure our resilience in the survival-mode paradigm — we name it brand solidarity.
Perhaps it is this approach that will pivot a new era of social interaction between people, communities, brands and even countries — joined together under a stronger together mindset not because it sounds right, but because it truly is what should be done.
Of course, the ideas of collaborative society or social purpose are not new to business or branding. What has changed is that the pandemic has rearranged the ways in which we interact, intrinsically and delicately linked by societal fabric, as well as the way we see relationships: a brand can no longer elude the emotional bond with its employees, because they are now more vulnerable than ever-before imagined; a brand can no longer play with the authenticity of its empathic message but make it unquestionable, as our health crisis is also a trust and reliability crisis; a brand can no longer be insensitive to communities’ or society’s expectations (or write them off as NGO business) but listen and act to support them.
Now, more than ever, brands have to be in-sync with all stakeholders’ needs, including society as a whole, to actually yield results through the behaviour they instruct.
Yet how many brands question their values as being suitable to the context, how many ask themselves: are my values truly socially relevant? Am I capable of genuinely engaging my organisation, my clients, my partners, my communities? Am I preparing for this new type of engagement protocol?
Those brands who carry socially relevant values in their DNA will respond to this crisis naturally: they will transcend the typical crisis PR communication and actually create social relevance. Their initiatives will come instinctively from the ranks of every level of the organisation and not await corporate-HQ instructions. Their behaviour will be organic.
Those brands who find their values at odds with the current situation, should better take a hard look at their essence.
Impact is more within our grasp than we might think — brand solidarity is not reserved to big-budget brands or category leaders. It is merely a question of perspective, mindset and will.
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.