About branding and the work that matters — interview with Alexandru Grigorescu, co-founder of Toud

After so many years in branding and design, what makes you feel, concretely, that a project makes sense?

For me and for the Toud team, a project makes sense — meaning it deserves to exist — if it fits within what we call a “triple win strategy”: the seller wins, the buyer wins, and the community wins. And that community is twofold, because it belongs to the worlds of both. We believe strongly in this and always choose our projects based on it.

What’s the sign that a brand has found the right identity: what changes in people’s behavior, not just in the visuals?

A brand lives only in people’s minds. It describes the relationship a person has with a product, a service, a company, or other things — places, experiences, and so on. Unfortunately, we’re living through a period in our civilization where people deeply need a sense of meaning, of belonging, of community. But all of that really comes down to the relationships people have with one another and with something greater than themselves — whatever that may be for each person. On this need, this absence, the relationship between people and abstract things has started to flourish. Brands have grown more powerful because each of us has allowed it, has fed it. I’d even dare say we don’t actually need brands — or if we do, it should really be the exception. Strange thing to say, I know, especially coming from someone who builds brands every single day. But brands can be good as long as they genuinely do good for people, and that should be the primary goal. Obviously, that’s rarely how it works out. The real primary goal is to sell. That’s the world we’ve built — the one we live in today. Without selling, the whole system collapses. And yet, within all of this, some brands — very few — manage to exist in a kind of balance. There are brands that give people a hand, make them dream, hope, believe in themselves and in their path. And that’s genuinely beautiful. That’s my answer: a brand has found the right identity as long as it can give people that kind of impulse. In strictly business terms, a brand has found its identity when sales grow on the basis of a real connection between a person and a product, service, or company.

When you feel you’ve taken on too many projects and deliverables, how do you stop and reset? What do you do, concretely, to come back with energy?

We’re a small agency, maybe even very small, and because of that, our work and our existence is a constant fight. We reach that point often. What helps me enormously is nature. That’s where I feel at home, where I feel I have purpose, and above all where I’m reminded of something I tend to forget when I’m staring at a screen: life itself. I used to go into nature running; now I go with the little ones. I hope to teach them that life is a gift, and that only a real sense of balance will let them enjoy it and truly value it. And of course, we owe it to ourselves to be grateful for that gift every single day.

You say you want a marketing that is fair to everyone involved. Tell us about a situation where you chose that direction, even when it wasn’t the most comfortable one.

As long as we’re inside this current paradigm of exchange, truly fair marketing is very hard to pull off. And here’s why I say that: exchange between people is something elevated, something that implies mutual care. Today, most of the time, it’s just a transaction. People no longer connect, no longer really know each other. You go to the store and you grab a pack of butter. Yes, there are exceptions. You go to Exec-Edu and you meet the person who actually gives you the learning by talking with you, by building a real relationship. Honestly, thinking this way makes our work difficult sometimes. We work mostly in B2B, trying through brand strategy to make people’s working lives a little better, to help them find shared ambition, a sense of belonging, common values, and above all a bit of meaning. When we manage to do that, we feel our work actually means something. We often turn down B2C projects built around selling things. We get a lot of packaging design requests, and there we only get involved when we genuinely feel we can contribute to something that goes beyond the purely transactional.

From Management 360, which idea changed the way you think about business the most?

I realized I was too attached to what I had built at Toud. At the end of the day, business is a game you should enjoy, beyond the joy of bringing value to the people you serve. And I’d add one more thing: I loved the strategy course, and the seemingly endless energy that Lavinia Rașcă brought to every single session.