Neumarkt
A medieval name, brewed modern
Neumarkt is a Transylvanian beer with deep local equity — born in 1998 at the Bere Mureș brewery in Târgu Mureș, it had become one of the most recognized beer brands in Romania and, in its home region, something close to a civic symbol. When Heineken Romania took the brand into its portfolio, it inherited that hard-won regional loyalty along with a question every owner of an acquired heritage brand has to answer: how do you raise a local favorite’s standing in a national, increasingly premium beer market without spending the very authenticity that made it loved in the first place?
By 2017 that question had a sharp commercial edge. Neumarkt’s masculine, regional character was an asset, but its design was reading as dated next to the perceived quality of the brands it now competed with on shelf and at the tap. Heineken Romania set Brandient a deliberately bounded brief: lift the brand through design — more masculine, more modern, higher in perceived quality — without repositioning away from the origin that gives Neumarkt its meaning. This was a design upgrade in service of a business goal, not a reinvention; the equity was not to be touched, only made to look worth more.
Brandient’s governing move was to make heritage do the work of premium. Rather than chase a generic contemporary look, the team anchored the identity in the brand’s own origin story — Neumarkt is the German name of Târgu Mureș, recorded in medieval chronicles as Neumarkt am Mieresch as far back as 1332. The city’s coat of arms and historical stamps were brought onto the label not as decoration but as proof of authenticity a drinker reads instantly: a beer with a real place and a long past behind it, which is exactly the cue a mainstream lager needs to justify a step up in perceived quality. Masculinity, the other half of the brief, was carried by the system’s discipline rather than by clutter — a signature thick blue frame and bold slab typography giving every pack and every poster the same confident, unmistakable presence.
That discipline is what turns a label refresh into an asset Heineken could run at scale. A single recognizable framework — the blue frame, the typographic voice, the heraldic origin marks, a defined color palette — was built to hold its shape across bottle and can, across out-of-home, television, digital and the on-trade, so that the brand looks like itself everywhere a consumer meets it. For a portfolio owner, that consistency is the commercial payoff: a coherent, instantly identifiable Neumarkt that trades up on perceived quality while keeping faith with the Transylvanian origin that remains its strongest claim on the shelf.
Client:
Heineken Romania
Industry:
Food and Beverages
Project type:
Design Upgrade
Date:
2017
Services:
Brand Design Strategy, Label and Packaging Design, Logo and Visual Identity Program, Communication Design
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