The Power of Branding x Time

When I started my journey in brand design, now about 20 years ago. One of my first clients in Asia, I worked with was Vinamilk out of Vietnam. At the time already a huge local enterprise, but with branding and packaging that wasn't much more than simple graphic design surrounded by text.

At the time when I started worked with Vinamilk, I was the first foreigner, working in a brand design agency that ever presented branding & packaging design solutions to their management team. They were not familiar with the discipline, but the company had huge ambitions to become one of the leading enterprises locally, and regionally.

Below: a picture of the Vinamilk head office in 2002 as well as how their packaging looked, before they started to leverage the power of brand design.

Over the next years, we developed a fantastic open working relationship that lasted for several years where they were truly appreciative of the changes we were able to make for them, absorbed knowledge and integrated best practices within their own processes, building their own systems and methods around driving branding excellence. For me personally these are as well some of the most rewarding type of exercises you can get involved with as you see the transformation, both visually as well as financially.

I was clear that Vinamilk understood how the power of branding and design could help them accelerate their business and drive tremendous growth for the company.

Over the years, Vinamilk has risen to become one of the top Vietnam power brands, it is also the only representative of South East Asia to be listed in four global rankings on the world's most valuable and strongest brands. And perhaps most relevant, the company ranks as the 8th most valuable dairy brand in the world, with a brand value of 2.4 billion USD.

Talk about the power of branding compounded by time! Look back at the S&P 500 and some of the biggest companies that have failed to stay relevant have disappeared. Vinamilk is there at the top competing with the best of them now!

Fast forward 20 years later and you can imagine how excited I was when we got a call from Vinamilk asking if Square44 was interested to help work on their master brand relaunch and the corporate branding.

With our paths crossing again this was one of those projects you almost want to manage yourself, just for old times sake. But lucky we have a very solid team that now helps me take care of projects, probably much better than I was able to back in the day.

And what a great start, our very first relaunch instantly hits it off and sets the stage for a much larger company wide corporate rebranding exercise.