Case Studies
The owner and Marketing Manager of the agency – Polimira Miteva spent 4 years as brand manager for Astera — the oral care brand of Aroma, Bulgaria’s largest cosmetics manufacturer. During that period, Astera became the highest-revenue brand in the company’s portfolio. The story of that transformation is a good illustration of what it means to manage a brand not just with good products, but with a precise perception strategy.
Astera has existed for 55 years — long enough to have lived through everything Bulgaria has lived through in that time: communism, the transition after 1989, the arrival of Western brands with massive advertising budgets, and the gradual build-out of a more globalized consumer market.
That arrival is exactly where the problem started. After 1989, Western brands like Colgate and Aquafresh entered Bulgaria with powerful campaigns and quickly built an image of “quality from abroad.” Domestic manufacturing, including Astera, remained technically strong — toothpaste produced even in the mass segment was genuinely high quality — but perception fell sharply behind reality. Astera was seen as a cheaper, lower-quality alternative. Not because it was one, but because no one had told a different story about it.
That was the central task of the brand management mandate: reposition the brand against its actual quality, not against its outdated perception.
The solution wasn’t just “new packaging.” It was a series of premium product lines, each built around a specific, recognizable action — something the consumer could feel, not just read on a label:
Astera Parodont was and remains the brand’s flagship product — a toothpaste that has been in the home of nearly every Bulgarian consumer at one point or another. The line got a modern redesign and expanded with two new variants — with herbs, and for sensitive teeth.
The new design combined medical cleanliness with a modern look — a balance that on its own communicates trust without sounding dated or overly clinical. The visual language also added signals of authority: an endorsement from the Bulgarian Dental Association (BDA) and a reference to the patented formula. These are exactly the kinds of proof points that close the gap between “perceived” and “actual” quality — not a claim, but third-party evidence.
If Parodont had to reinforce trust with the existing audience, Astera Icer had the opposite, and much harder, task: bring the brand to Gen Z and move it past its post-socialist image — without losing the 55-year authenticity that was actually an asset, not a burden.
The strategy focused on a specific, highly emotional pain point among young consumers: bad breath. Not an abstract “freshness,” but a direct, social fear — exactly the motivation that makes a 16-year-old check their breath five times before a date.
Execution ran through:
Alongside the toothpaste work came another large-scale project — a full redesign of Astera’s entire toothbrush range. Not a cosmetic packaging swap, but a structural one: every line got clear technical differentiation — specific benefits and specific specs, visible at a glance, instead of visually identical brushes distinguished only by handle color.
The significance of this project is in its scale: Astera toothbrushes are the No. 1 seller in Bulgaria. That means the redesign wasn’t a niche experiment — it was a change that became instantly visible on the shelf of every single supermarket in the country, one of the most directly visible touchpoints between the brand and millions of consumers, every time they reach for the oral care aisle.
Behind these product stories stood a large operational reality: 25 products launched in 4 years, and leadership of massive national campaigns covering every major channel — including television. These weren’t isolated creative decisions, but a consistent repositioning program, executed product by product, campaign by campaign, until market perception actually caught up with product quality.
The result: Astera became the highest-revenue brand in the portfolio of Aroma — Bulgaria’s largest cosmetics manufacturer.
The experience of building and repositioning a national FMCG brand — from product strategy through design to mass campaigns — is the foundation Marketing Juju’s work stands on today.
