Few people arrive at branding through computational mathematics, advertising, education, and design leadership. Fewer still rebuild their career from scratch in a new country. Yet that’s exactly what Anastasia Butrym has done.
Now partner and strategy director at Shuka Design Bureau, Butrym approaches branding less as an exercise in marketing than as a way of understanding human behaviour.
In this interview, Butrym reflects on the lessons of starting over in Australia, the experiences that shaped her unconventional career, and why she believes the future of branding belongs to businesses that can be understood just as clearly by people as they can by algorithms.
Let’s begin with your background. Looking back, what did starting over in a new country teach you?
Anastasia Butrym: I moved my whole professional life to a market that had never heard of me. Twenty-five years of reputation didn’t cross the border. In Moscow, I had run an advertising agency, then built my own, directed a design school, and led a large design team inside the biggest tech ecosystem in Russia. In Sydney, I’m still no one. Losing your identity completely in mid-life is a good shake-up. That was the first lesson, and it wasn’t gentle. When you introduce yourself and name the projects that always spoke for themselves, but no one in this market has heard of them, you quickly learn which of your skills are real and which rested on local trust.
The second lesson was about language. Speaking English at work and presenting at conferences isn’t the same thing as small talk on a 6 am dog walk. I had the working language; I’m still working on the small talk. But a non-native has a hidden advantage. In a language that isn’t yours, you can never half-listen. Every conversation is active listening, full attention, or you lose the thread. Your native tongue lets you relax and fill in the other person’s words for them, often wrongly. A foreign one keeps you switched on. That forced full attention made me a sharper reader of people than I was when language came for free.
The third lesson is quieter, and it’s about ego. Starting over makes you a beginner again, and a beginner sees more. But first, it wounds your pride. Thirty years behind the wheel, yet I passed the Australian driving test on the fourth attempt. It was like that with a lot of things. Running a school, I had stopped being anyone’s student. Here I had to become a student again at things I had long counted as mine. it’s not always easy, I will admit, but it’s always useful.
Where did your fascination with human behaviour begin?
AB: From a school physics lesson. I had a teacher, Yakov Lerner, and he explained things like no one else. He showed me one simple thing that has stayed with me for life: everything in the world breaks down into particles, and the interesting part isn’t the particles but what connects them. The forces acting between them. Once I was stuck on a problem about a ball on a slope, and he said, “Imagine you are the ball. Where would you roll, and why?” I was thirteen, and something clicked. I stopped looking at the ball from the outside and felt, from the inside, the forces that move it.
Since then, I have humanised the inanimate. About any problem, any part, any system, I don’t ask how it’s built. I ask what influences it and what motivates it. A brand, to me, isn’t a logo or a product. It’s a character. It has desires, fears, and a way of speaking. Ask a brand “who are you?” and “what are you afraid of?” and the rest falls into place.
What continues to motivate you professionally?
AB: Two things. The first is curiosity. The work never repeats. Every new business, every new market is a different problem, different people, a different knot to untie. In all these years, I have never once been bored.
The second is having like-minded people beside me. For a long time, I thought I saw things too much my own way to share them with anyone. It turned out there are people right next to me who see the same way. Partners, a team. We finish each other’s thinking, and what began as my private way of looking became something we hold together. Watching someone other than me see what I see still fascinates me. Alone, it would be less interesting, and it would certainly not go as far.
Your career has taken some unexpected turns, going from computational mathematics to branding and design leadership. How did that journey unfold?
AB: The path looks strange written down. A degree from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University, then selling chewing gum, then a marketing manager at big FMCG corporations, then advertising and branding, five years running a design school, Chief Design Officer at the biggest tech ecosystem in Russia, and then branding again.
Now I think every turn had a reason of its own. My childhood still belonged to the Soviet era, where there were almost no brands, and the few that existed lived by their own laws, nothing like a market. Then the doors opened, and Western brands poured into Russia. It was something completely new, and I could not resist it. Still a student, I was already selling Wrigley’s gum to Moscow kiosks, and after my degree, I never went back to maths. Brands fascinated me. That was the real start.
The training kept adding layers. As a child, I attended art school, then a specialist English school, and studied in the U.S., on one of the first exchange programmes, then I studied computational mathematics. Later, many different programmes and courses, among them a British fashion styling diploma and an Australian graphic design diploma. I’m grateful to fate for that mix. Maths gave me structure, styling gave me a system, design gave me the ability to visualise. Reading a brand well needs all three at once, and it seems they came to me in the right order.
The through-line stayed analytical the whole time. Maths taught me to trust structure over opinion. Sales taught me that structure is useless if you cannot see the actual person in front of you. Advertising taught me to single out the one thing that matters and pack it into five seconds. Five years running the British Higher School of Art and Design put me inside one of the most creative places on earth. One approach, different objects.
How has your background shaped the way you approach brand strategy?
AB: Maths taught me not to confuse a description with a model. A description fits what you have already seen. A model works where you have not been. From a brand, I want exactly that, a model: to know how it will behave in a situation that has not happened yet. So I see a brand not as an image but as a system: a network of actors and the links between them. The character lives not in the actors but in the links. The same product in a different network of links is a different brand.
That makes my approach closer to diagnosis than to decoration. I look not for what a brand declares, but for what it fails to notice about itself: two actors that have been pulling in opposite directions for years, cancelling each other out. Until that is named, no identity will save it. And once it’s named, and the structure holds, the visible part — logo, colour, tone — almost derives itself.
What are the most important lessons you’ve learned about building brands?
AB: A brand isn’t what you say about yourself. It’s the sum of every actor acting in your name, including the ones you don’t control. Second, coherence beats ambition. A brand can win from any level of meaning, but it cannot win from three levels at once. Third, the shadow is data. What people flee from tells you as much as what they choose. I built a whole reading of Sydney on that. Every suburb has its draw and its shadow, and the shadow is never noise.
What do businesses most often misunderstand about branding?
AB: They think branding is positioning and visual identity. Those are outputs. Branding is the decision system that produces them. When a business skips the system and buys the outputs, it gets something that looks finished and behaves incoherently. The other misunderstanding is that a brand must lead with purpose, but it doesn’t. Plenty of strong brands lead from what they make or how they make it. The failure isn’t the wrong level. It’s having no single level at all.
As a studio partner, what excites you most about Shuka’s work today?
AB: What excites me most is that the moment has finally caught up with the method. Today, a brand is read by people and by machines. AI writes the copy and draws the pictures on a brand’s behalf, every day. So a brand has to be built so that a human and an algorithm read it the same way, without distortion. This is where being fractal pays off. Fractal Branding is fractal in the literal sense: the same reading works on the whole brand and on any single actor inside it. That is a structure that a machine can take apart. We spent years building the method without thinking about AI, and it turned out to be exactly what a brand needs in a world of algorithms. And we are always working with new tools, testing fresh generative models before they go mainstream. The method grew into its moment, and the moment grew into it.
Can you explain the research approach you developed and the problems it solves?
AB: Fractal Branding reads a brand as a network. We brought together four things. From Latour, the idea that a brand is a network of actors, human and non-human, plus anti-actors working against it. From Sinek, three levels of meaning: what, how, and why. From Jung and Carol Pearson, twelve archetypes arranged across four human motivations. From Berne’s transactional analysis, the way those actors talk to each other, cleanly or at cross purposes. Each actor gets a level and an archetype. Then you read the whole network at once. The problem it solves is incoherence you cannot see. Most brands don’t have a positioning problem. They have actors pulling against each other, and no one has named it. What matters isn’t the actors on their own, but how they hold together.
What gaps in traditional brand research made you build something different?
AB: It’s easiest to show with today’s content, music, and film. You can describe it in two ways. The first is the Netflix way: give it a genre. Thriller, drama, comedy. You put the thing in a box and stop there. The second is the Spotify way: look at which playlists the song lives in and what it sits next to. Not the genre, the context. Not what it is, but where it is and who it is with.
Traditional brand research works like Netflix. One label per brand: one archetype, one promise, one persona of thirty-four who likes convenience. That is a description, not a force. And it’s almost always false, because a real brand is dynamic, plural and full of contradictions.
I needed the second approach. In branding, it’s almost never used. The closest I have come across is mapping a Brand Neighborhood, but that is only about brands, and we go wider: an actor can be anyone or anything. Fractal Branding describes a brand not by a category but by a network of relationships: which contexts it falls into, what it sits beside, who acts in its name, including the non-human actors, which now means algorithms and AI. A category is a point. A network of relationships is a map. I wanted the map.
How does your process surface insights businesses would otherwise miss?
AB: It forces you to name the actors nobody put on the list. A courier. A bird in the logo. A route. A neighbourhood. Once each is on the board with its current motivation and a level, the friction becomes visible. You see the two forces that have been quietly cancelling each other for years.
And it’s often the one nobody listed that decides everything. A small, invisible actor sets off the butterfly effect: a light move here, a storm at the other end of the brand. And a black swan always comes from what was never named. That is why the method insists you name them all, down to the courier and the bird: to catch the butterfly before the storm, and see the swan while it’s still a dot on the horizon. Clients usually know something is wrong. They cannot point to it. The method points to it.
How do you translate research findings into practical decisions?
AB: Every actor and the links between them turn into cause-and-effect rules. Not yellow and round, the way a brand book states it with no reason, but yellow and no sharp angles because the brand is friendly and accessible. That isn’t taste, it’s the psychology of colour and shape, tested in experiments. The difference is huge. A blind rule works only while the situation is exactly the one described. A reason always works. No yellow to hand? Someone who understands what they are transmitting will choose orange over white and get it right. We call this a Brand Graph, and it’s rapidly replacing the brand book.
Can you share an example where the methodology changed a project’s direction?
AB: My most interesting case right now is Sydney. I’m mapping every suburb in the city through the twelve archetypes, each with its own set of actors and anti-actors, its draw and its shadow. I gather all of it daily through social listening and AI. It began as a personal project and turned into a property intelligence tool because buyers don’t choose a suburb on price and commute. They choose on character. They are buying a version of themselves. Or the version that gives them what they lack. To understand the industry from the inside, I got my assistant agent certificate in real estate. I want to work alongside agents and see how it really operates. A completely new field for me, and I find it fascinating.
I use this method in my own life too. For example, I collect the actors of Sydney’s public figures — a person is a network of actors too, just like a brand. I look for where their actors overlap with mine and find the ones I have the most in common with. Then I try on their other actors, the ones I don’t know yet. People like me lead me to what I cannot yet see in a new city. That is how I learned it. For a migrant learning to read a new place, it’s a useful tool, I think.
Looking ahead, what research or innovation are you most keen to explore next?
AB: Two directions, and both are radical. The first is to make the graph measurable. Right now, it’s an interesting model, but I claim that yellow works because the brand is friendly, and friendly works because of the psychology of colour perception. I want to prove it, not assert it. To test a brand’s character on the body — eye-tracking, EEG, the amygdala’s response to sharp and rounded shapes. The mathematician in me doesn’t want description. It wants measurement and the right to be wrong. Branding you can falsify, that is what interests me.
The second is to stop building a brand and start growing it. Even the graph is still a snapshot, a fixed structure. I want to set not the result but the genome: the rules by which the actors interact, and let the brand adapt on its own. A living identity that grows and changes with the world around it. That comes from my other practice. Since I was five, I’ve photographed flowers, and now I turn them into artworks and short films with AI. You don’t assemble a flower, you grow it.
These are my two halves. One wants to measure. The other wants to grow. I want to take the method to where the two meet.
