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Everytime I travel, this time to our home away Villa Alila at the beautiful boutique Sumberkima Hill retreat in the tranquil North-West of Bali, buying a Monocle magazine is one of my favorite habits. I love the world’s most smart, stylish and sophisticated print medium. Because of its looks, its language and the lifestyle it represents. Monocle is of course already much more than a magazine; as can be read on Google: ‘Monocle is a global affairs and lifestyle magazine, 24-hour radio station, website, retailer and media brand, all produced by Winkontent Ltd. It was founded by Tyler Brûlé, a Canadian entrepreneur, Financial Times columnist, and founder of (the also very cool) Wallpaper* magazine.’ Or as can be read on its own website: ‘Monocle is a briefing on global affairs, business, culture, design and much more.’

Soon – if you’ve got enough money – you’ll be even able to buy your own piece of Monocle real estate as brand prepares to launch up to a dozen apartment buildings across the world.

Tyler Brûlé is working on plans to launch a high-end apartment complex in Bangkok in partnership with a luxury Thai property developer. Monocle is the latest upmarket brand to team up with property developers, following ventures launched by Bulgari, Armani and Aston Martin. If the Bangkok project proves successful, Brûlé said the style and travel magazine could launch bespoke residences in a dozen world cities.

This month’s issue, 118, November 2018, is called Netherlands special. Monocle travelled from Groningen to Eindhoven, via the Hague to Rotterdam. Amsterdam was not on the list. Not because it’s less interesting, but because: ‘Busy, beautiful and canal-riven Amsterdam is already a darling for creatives and a bastion of sophisticated liberalism’.

Apart from this interesting piece of country and city branding content, I was, moreover, triggered by the Business Report: ‘What’s next for branding’. Monocle challenged some top creative and strategic minds from Europe, Asia and the US, to tell us where the industry is heading.

Here are some headlines:

‘Designers used to be conduits for clients’ wishes; now there is more of a dialogue…One of the most important things is matching the branding with the product. There’s no point in masking a cheap product with expensive looking branding’ – Naomi Hirabayashi, founder, Plug-in Graphic, Tokyo.

‘We try to think about brands as if they’ve come to life and you engage with them in a conversational manner. A brand becomes a persona or a personality; it becomes an avatar…The more human brands are, the more they have to hold themselves accountable – and the more people will buy into them…In the beginning people would ask us for “outputs”: build up a website; come up with a campaign for us; do some design work for this. It then transitioned to doing more brand work for digital. And now we’ve got to “Can you design the heart and soul of my business, as well as how my business communicates to the outside world across all touch points”…In the past year we’ve been seeing the notion of “personalisation”, rather than “personal”. To build a personalised experience is a lot harder: you have to know more information about me, specifically about what I’m looking for and to be able to serve me with either products or services that match what I’m seeking.’ – Emmet Shine, founder and executive creative director  Gin Lane Media, New York.

‘A lot of communication is electronic, meaning it can be animated, fluid and highly mobile. If I were to counter that with a slightly more jaundiced view, I think clients have latched onto the idea of “branding” and, because we’ve moved on from what was known as identity design to branding desing, there’s a tendency for clients to take much more ownership over the production of it. I think that’s resulted in a change of terrain: you have cases of bad design that are actually good branding. The Virgin logo is an example: in pure design terms it is pretty ghastly but in branding terms it is an absolute smash hit…Everyone wants branding to do much more than just be an identifier and I think that’s distorted the playing field. If you apply the principles of design – clarity and appropriateness – you will get better results. A way to think about this is to take famous brands and look at the description of what their intention is; they are pretty much interchangeable…A lot of brands draw from the same playbook. Having the courage to break out of that will reap the best results though. Take a stand! Saying that, you still need to think about function and the need to create something that stays in the memory. Think about the icons on your phone. There are some that you’ll remember without any hesitation and some of them you won’t remember at all. Icon design is a really good way of refining and honing a mark or a symbol that stays in the memory…The next big wave in design and advertising is artificial intelligence. There are people doing it already – and I think we are close to clients being able to sit at their computer and create their own branding.’ – Adrian Shaughnessy, graphic designer, lecturer and author of the design handbook How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, London.

‘One of the key differences is that you need to be present and embedded in so many more places. But the principles of brand-building are somewhat timeless: have a clear idea of the story you want to tell and then apply that everywhere you show up. But the consumer is going to get bored if you’re showing up the exact same way on Instagram as you are on your website. You’ve got to find a way to have one voice but with a lot of nuance and surprise built into it…Now you’ll have three businesses launching at the same time selling the same thing, so it’s much more important to figure out an emotional hook. How are you going to get people to fall in love out of the gate before your competition wins over that audience? How can you build a brand that speaks to an emotional truth that connect with people long term? Starting with strategy and making sure that you’ve got a unique idea is what leads to fresh work…Brand is a living and breathing thing; it needs to constantly evolve. That doesn’t mean you need to change your logo but the experience around the core identity needs to stay fresh…I don’t think that you can survive in the 2020’s by being a company that just focuses on a logo, a set of typefaces and a few colours. That’s just not how brands live in the world these days.’ – Emily Heyward, co-founder and chief strategist, Red Antler, New York