Hunter Tura
Brand investment rarely shifts competitive position. The reason is structural: most organisations assign brand as a communications problem and then wonder why the result is a new logo rather than a new relationship with customers. The gap between what brand costs and what it produces is not a creative failure: it is a design failure, and it requires a different kind of thinking to close.
Brand strategist and design leader Hunter Tura helps senior leaders understand why brand investment fails to produce competitive returns, and how design-led approaches produce outcomes that communications-led ones do not.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Hunter Tura
- His “22nd Century Brand” framework, developed publicly through DesignSingapore Council, gives leadership teams a precise vocabulary for what brand investment is actually supposed to deliver, reframing brand from a static identity asset to a dynamic participation platform that drives commercial affiliation.
- He has built and run design businesses at CEO level, which means his counsel on brand strategy is not advisory abstraction. Rather, it is the same kind of operational decision-making he is asking leadership teams to make.
- His client portfolio spans luxury (Prada, Chanel, Tiffany), cultural institutions (Victoria & Albert Museum, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), aviation (Changi Airport), and technology (Netflix, GE, Samsung) providing a level of cross-sector pattern recognition that a single-sector brand consultant cannot offer.
- His formation in architecture under Rem Koolhaas at Harvard GSD gives him a systems-thinking approach to brand that most strategists, who are trained in marketing or communications, lack. It shows in how he diagnoses problems others misread.
- His work at Entro on experiential branding and the built environment addresses a dimension of brand strategy – how physical spaces communicate and shape participation – that is almost entirely absent from the mainstream brand conversation, but increasingly urgent for property, hospitality, aviation, and cultural sectors.
Biography highlights
- Chief Creative Officer, Entro Communications (appointed November 2025); previously President & CEO, Bruce Mau Design (2010–2019) and CEO, The Creative Organization
- Client work spanning Netflix, Samsung, GE, Unilever, Audi, Lululemon, Changi Airport Group, Lucid Motors, and the Victoria & Albert Museum
- Curator, Canada Pavilion, 2018 London Design Biennale; juror, Presidential Design Awards Singapore (2017) and Florence Design Biennale (2019)
- Commentator, “Design Canada” (2017 documentary)
- Creator of “The 22nd Century Brand” – a conceptual series produced with DesignSingapore Council and the National Design Centre, reframing brand evolution as a strategic and societal imperative
- March, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (thesis directed by Rem Koolhaas); Supermentor, Harvard Business School Field X/Y programme; Alumni Council, Harvard GSD
Biography
The organisations that use brand to create durable competitive advantage treat it as a design discipline, not a marketing function.
Hunter Tura has spent 25 years at that boundary, running Bruce Mau Design as President & CEO for nine years, founding SYNDICATE X and The Creative Organization, and now serving as Chief Creative Officer at Entro Communications, where he leads creative strategy across experiential branding, wayfinding, and built-environment design at an international scale.
His client work crosses sectors that rarely share a diagnostic framework: luxury goods (Prada, Chanel, Tiffany), cultural institutions (the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), aviation and hospitality (Changi Airport, Marina Bay Sands), and technology (Netflix, GE, Samsung).
The common strategic problem is consistent: how does an organisation make its brand do genuine commercial work rather than simply look credible?
That question has a specific intellectual architecture in Tura’s hands. His “22nd Century Brand” framework traces how brand has evolved from static trademark to dynamic participation platform. The organisations ahead of their competitors have designed brand as a system. The ones falling behind have commissioned a refresh.
Tura holds an MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where his thesis was supervised by Rem Koolhaas, and a BA from Haverford College in the Growth and Structure of Cities. He has served on the Harvard GSD Alumni Council, is a Supermentor at Harvard Business School, and was curator of the Canada Pavilion at the 2018 London Design Biennale. He also appeared as a commentator in the 2017 documentary Design Canada.
Key speaking topics
- Brand strategy as a driver of competitive growth
- Design-led business transformation
- Experiential branding and the built environment
- The evolution of brand from identity to participation platform
- Building and leading creative organisations at scale
- Cross-sector brand innovation
- The commercial case for design thinking
Ideal for
- CMOs and senior marketing leadership managing significant brand investment with unclear ROI
- CEOs and boards navigating brand repositioning, post-merger integration, or market repositioning
- Senior leaders in property, hospitality, aviation, and cultural sectors where physical environment is central to brand experience
- Executive education cohorts in innovation, design strategy, or competitive differentiation
Audience outcomes
- A diagnostic framework for identifying why brand investment is not producing competitive returns – with named examples from luxury, tech, and cultural sectors
- A clear distinction between communications-led and design-led brand strategy, and what each produces
- Practical language for commissioning, evaluating, and challenging brand strategy work at leadership level
- An understanding of how experiential and environmental design is reshaping brand expectations across sectors
- Exposure to cross-sector patterns from a practitioner who has made CEO-level brand decisions across more than twenty years and four distinct industry categories