Bitdefender

A Marketing Story by Brandient about Bitdefender

2 Views | 0 High Fives

Bitdefender

Brand Development

Challenge

The anti-virus and Internet security industry is characterized by a frantic, sophisticated evolution in the fight with malware. In 2011, the Romanian-originated Bitdefender was ranked as the best antivirus product by major testing organizations worldwide. The outstanding performance, global reputation and growth prospects prompted the need for a modern brand. The main challenge was to choose between a multinational, somehow rootless image of the company, as opposed to an indication of its national origins. Although the leadership and the talent are still mostly Romanian, the weak nation brand was a deterrent for the latter option.

Solution

The brand strategic solution was the toughest answer to the challenge: to build a powerful, international brand but with a strong hint to its national origins. In order to circumvent the weak country brand, a mix of ancient values with present relevance were deftly brought to the game. And here enters the Dragon-Wolf. The legendary Dragon-Wolf guarded the Dacian (old Romanian) people in their wars and has come to stand for resilient defense. The modern interpretation of the ancient symbol completes the brand promise with sleekness, making the brand relevant to digital society, while the new brand slogan “Awake” highlightes the idea of continuing protection. The symbol is subtly asserting the Romanian roots, but in a mythical approach, available to a global audience. The archetypal symbol was given two shapes: a 3D avatar, for establishing a bond with the consumers’ minds, and a highly abstractive symbol for representing the new chapter in the history of the Bitdefender organization. The logo symbol needed to be abstract enough and open to interpretation, so the line was reduced and then reduced some more — removing all explicative pieces — to its very essence of compressed spring energy and darting movement. The Brand Avatar is the consumer-facing side of the identity, epitomizing the sleek qualities of the product, and it’s designed to keep evolving in time. It features boldly on the new package, which preserved the equity of the colour palette from the old packaging. The whole packaging identity was created with the aim to substitute and take over a part of the advertising effort, so the new package acts like a print ad. Bitdefender Enterprise The need for a new approach within the booming B2B division came up as Bitdefender Enterprise’s innovative security solutions and services acceded to a technological leadership position in many critical virtualization security areas — targeting from SMEs up to very large enterprises and cloud service providers. At the visual identity level, Brandient envisioned The Glass City metaphor in order to represent not only Bitdefender’s capability to screen massive amounts of corporate data for potential threats, but also the general trend towards cloud-based solutions and virtualization that takes place in the enterprise market. In order to represent the relations employed in the intimate mechanisms of complex data systems, Brandient came up with a logic for building intricate diagrams based on a custom, comprehensive taxonomy of physical and virtual components, functions and states able to accommodate even functionalities that are not invented yet. Bitdefender Luminous Avatar Four years after the global rebranding, the Bitdefender brand identity has undertaken an enhancement of its symbolic Dacian Wolf visual metaphor. The reinterpretation of the Bitdefender Dacian avatar in a new stance is expressing more accurately the competitive advantage of the business, the true differentiation of Bitdefender — that is, the intelligence of its engineers, their imagination, their minds — hence the brightness and magic of the new design. The new, luminous Dacian Wolf brand avatar, powered by “engineered intuition” and created to guard against all dangers hidden in the arcane intricacies of the digital realm, is now closer to Bitdefender’s customers. The project was conceptualized and designed by Brandient, and implemented by the Bucharest based 3D design studio, Carioca.

Corporate Identity