Foster + Svensson and Maja Knežević: Expanding strategic perspective

Vladimir von Bergdorff — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:23:13 +0000

Belgrade, Serbia — The Foster + Svensson and Maja Knežević, Brand Strategist, are pleased to further strengthen its strategic capabilities and enhance its expertise across brand strategy, brand development, and related areas of strategic marketing.

The addition of Maja’s experience comes at an important stage in the continued evolution of Foster + Svensson. Following the integration of Thornet and the company’s ongoing expansion at the intersection of branding, marketing, digital, technology, data, and innovation, Foster + Svensson continues to broaden the depth and scope of expertise it brings to its clients.

For Maja, this represents an opportunity to bring more than two decades of experience across brands, markets, and organizations into an environment where strategic, creative, digital, and technological disciplines increasingly converge. For Foster + Svensson, her experience brings an enhanced strategic dimension to the company’s ability to connect brand thinking with the realities of markets, businesses, and organizations.

PHOTO: Maja Knežević, Brand Strategist.

Together, these developments reflect an expansion and strengthening of Foster + Svensson’s strategic territory, creating a broader space in which strategic thinking, brand expertise, creativity, technology, and market understanding can work together.

With more than two decades of experience across marketing, brand development, communications, and strategic leadership, Maja Knežević brings extensive first-hand experience from within some of the world’s most recognized and competitive brands. Her career includes senior and leadership roles with HONOR, Huawei, Samsung, and Nokia, alongside earlier experience with FIAT and Saatchi & Saatchi.

Yet the significance of that experience lies less in the names of the organizations themselves than in what working within them has shaped: an understanding of how brands are built, managed, transformed, and sustained in real markets. Maja has spent her career working at the point where strategy meets implementation – where positioning needs to become meaningful to customers, where global brand direction need to work within local market realities, and where marketing decisions ultimately must contribute to wider business objectives.

This client-side perspective brings particular value to strategic brand work, while Foster + Svensson’s multidisciplinary environment provides a natural context in which that experience can be connected with strategic, creative, digital, and technological expertise.

The role of brand strategy today extends well beyond defining a positioning or articulating a proposition. Strong strategy needs to provide clarity for organizations, create alignment across stakeholders, inform decisions, and establish a foundation from which brands can evolve with confidence. It must also remain connected to the commercial, cultural, technological, and competitive forces shaping the market around it.

PHOTO: Maja Knežević, Brand Strategist.

Maja’s experience adds depth to this approach, shaped by having worked through these challenges from within organizations themselves. Her career has included the development and management of brands across different markets, categories, and stages of growth, with responsibilities spanning brand communications, marketing strategy, digital marketing, e-commerce, market development, and regional leadership. Most recently, Maja served as Marketing Director at HONOR, with responsibility for Austria, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia.

This breadth of experience complements Foster + Svensson’s existing capabilities, while providing Maja with an environment in which her strategic perspective can contribute to a broader range of disciplines, challenges, and client contexts. The result is not simply an expansion of a particular service. It is an enhanced strategic dimension to the way Foster + Svensson approaches the relationship between brand, business, market, and execution, and to the way Maja can apply her experience within a broader multidisciplinary perspective. It also reinforces an important principle: strategy creates the greatest value when it can move confidently from thinking to action.

Foster + Svensson’s recent integration of Thornet reflects this same direction. By bringing technology, data, and digital infrastructure into closer connection with its existing capabilities, the company has further expanded the ways in which it can support organizations as they navigate an increasingly complex environment.

Maja’s experience contributes to this evolution from the strategic and market perspective, strengthening the connection between what organizations are, what they want to become, and how their brands can support that ambition.

PHOTO: Maja Knežević, Brand Strategist.

There is also a deeper continuity behind Maja’s involvement with Foster + Svensson.

Having known and worked with Maja for more than 20 years, the company has had the opportunity to see first-hand the value of the experience she has accumulated across numerous markets, organizations, and industries. Her career represents the kind of professional perspective that is built over time: through decisions made, brands developed, markets entered, challenges addressed, and experience gained across different cultures and business environments.

At the same time, Foster + Svensson is built around the combination of disciplines, expertise, and perspectives, creating an environment in which experience can be shared, challenged, and translated into new forms of value. It is this mutual exchange that makes the collaboration particularly relevant. Maja brings an established strategic perspective shaped by market experience, while Foster + Svensson brings a multidisciplinary environment in which that perspective can contribute to broader strategic, creative, and business challenges.

Maja also brings a wide professional perspective through her involvement in the marketing industry, including her work as a member of the Effie Serbia and IAA juries. Her contribution will further strengthen work across brand strategy, strategic positioning, brand development, marketing strategy, and related strategic services, while enriching the connection between strategic thinking, creative expression, market understanding, and business performance.

The objective is not simply to create more strategic work, but to create stronger strategic thinking – thinking that is informed by experience, grounded in market reality, and capable of helping organizations make better decisions. Maja Knežević brings precisely that perspective.

Together, Maja Knežević and Foster + Svensson bring first-class experience, senior capabilities, and perspectives into a shared strategic territory, strengthening the company’s ability to connect people, expertise, and disciplines in ways that create stronger brands, more meaningful experiences, and sustainable business value for clients.

ABOUT FOSTER + SVENSSON

Foster + Svensson is an award-winning European branding, communications, and marketing company with heritage back in 1746 and incorporated in 2013 in Serbia, who put forward well-considered contemporary design, digital and innovation. Operating worldwide as part of Fosterova grupa, Foster + Svensson is positioned as professional services company, providing broad range of services and solutions in area of marketing. Having bold experience and specialized skills in more than 20 industries, company provides services to all company sizes. People at Foster + Svensson design brands, use digital technology, data, and strategy to create contemporary visual identities, services, and experiences to help corporate clients improve their performance and manage sustainable business value for stakeholders. Foster + Svensson design and drive innovation to improve the way world works and lives. Company approach is to be precise, punctual, and reliable to its clients, where it ran more than 2000 projects while working for major companies to be found in Fortune Global 500 and top-tier companies, such as HVB Bank, UniCredit Bank, Raiffeisen Bank, Banca Intesa, Addiko Bank, AikBank, Visa, Mastercard, Ericsson, Nokia, Telenor Group, Apple, Vodafone Group, A1 Telekom Austria Group, T-Mobile, CNN, RTS, Ringier Axel Springer, Samsung, Cheil, McCann Worldgroup, MullenLowe Group, Grey Worldwide, Carat, Dentsu Aegis Network, WPP, Publicis Groupe, Leo, Saatchi & Saatchi, Huawei, HONOR, Hisense, Gorenje, Asko, Ahold Delhaize, Maxi, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, AstraZeneca, Richter Gedeon, URSAPHARM, Takeda, Inditex, Zara, BMW Group, Renault Group, FIAT, Knight Frank. Work culture and ethics includes business excellence and delivery of outperforming results.

Foster + Svensson in one of the founders of MAI Marina Abramović Institute.

STRATEGY – Foster + Svensson branding company

Foster + Svensson and Maja Knežević: Expanding strategic perspective

Belgrade, Serbia — The Foster + Svensson and Maja Knežević, Brand Strategist, are pleased to further strengthen its strategic capabilities and enhance its expertise across brand strategy, brand development, and related areas of strategic marketing.

There is also a deeper continuity behind Maja’s involvement with Foster + Svensson.