"Branding is ultimately about planning your own system." Beyond hotels, we created a K-content universe.
A journey of trial and error and enlightenment from a branding director with 25 years of experience.

Most products are born with a brand name.
Not only tangible products like jeans, tires, and washing machines, but also intangible services like content and platforms like Netflix and Toss have brands.
Products thrive under the influence of brands, but few survive.
But in today's brand-flooded era, survival alone is not enough.
To ensure growth, a brand must go beyond survival and become loved by customers and earn their absolute trust.
So how can a brand be remembered by people for a long time?

The author of "Finding Branding in Urban Hanok" has been focusing on branding for 25 years while running a branding company.
After working as a brand consulting firm for major corporations such as Hanwha, Hyundai Motors, and Samsung Card, and being in charge of naming familiar brands such as LG's 'Whisen' and CJ's 'Petitzel', he decided to create his own brand rather than someone else's after a long career and opened the doors of the Hanok Hotel Nostalgia in Bukchon, Seoul.
In this book, he shares his journey of creating, growing, and ultimately gaining public and industry recognition through his trials and tribulations.
By following the author's story of nostalgia, a journey of entrepreneurship and brand growth, you can examine every stage of successful branding, from creating a brand name to establishing brand essence, marketing, positioning, and growth strategy.
This includes the process of establishing a company's identity, including its core values ​​and purpose of existence, and then expressing it through design, name, message, tone, and manner, and then building and maintaining relationships with customers and fulfilling its brand promise.
Rather than giving detailed instructions, the author paints a big picture.
Branding is not only important when starting a business, but is also an ongoing process that must be maintained throughout the operation and management of the business.
This book presents a single brand called Nostalgia, but it is not limited to the hotel industry; it introduces a branding mindset that can lead brands to sustained success in any industry.


Drawing on his experience in executing major projects, this book, which contains the author's experience and insights in growing a hotel from scratch into a cultural platform, will serve as a guide for entrepreneurs and branding strategists navigating uncertain times.

I define a business environment as a system, a framework within which meaning can be realized.
To make a successful career, a talented chef needs kitchen equipment, a food supply chain, and the right location.
Even if your head is full of ingenious flavor combinations, if you don't have a tangible or intangible system to implement them, they will remain just fantasy.
The same goes for the innovative ideas of startup founders.
Anyone can create an app, but to make it commercially successful, you need a realistic operating system, including a business location, communications facilities, and distribution network.
Money, personal networks, and market conditions are also part of the system.
A vision becomes a tangible outcome only when there is a solid implementation system to support it.
Even abstract intentions can only be transformed into concrete values ​​if there is a multi-layered system to support them.
In this context, this book is a field experience of someone who struggled to create a system and is still in the process of creating one.
--- From "A Nostalgic Startup Story from '0' by a Branding Director with 25 Years of Experience"

When we first meet someone, we get a sense of their character through their appearance, speech, and behavior.
The same goes for brands.
Every touchpoint—brand name, online platform, offline store atmosphere, employee service, product quality—reveals the brand's character.
What you sell is important, but now it's more important to pursue certain values, create specific products, and provide specific experiences to customers through those products.
A brand is an intangible asset formed through a deep connection with consumers, at the point where emotion and logic meet.
--- From "Chapter 1 Thinking 'Form (形式): The difference in thought system that determines whether you are loved or ignored'"

In an age where convenience has become a religion, spring water, not well water, is found in places that everyone avoids.
Items that the world deems impossible have less risk of loss, and things that people are reluctant to do create value.
The moment you think it's difficult to make, a barrier to entry is automatically created.
If you can do the impossible, you will have a monopoly.
--- From "Chapter 1 Thinking 'Form (形式): The difference in thought system that determines whether you are loved or ignored'"

A hotel is a commercial space, not a residential space, and is a space for lodging and service.
It is a space of a different dimension from motels or pensions whose main purpose is relaxation.
Services are intangible activities that meet customers' expectations and needs, and aim to deliver usefulness and satisfaction to customers.
Today's customers have a wealth of hospitality experiences and very sophisticated tastes.
To ensure service satisfaction, you must provide unexpected surprises to those who anticipate the service's development process.
The hospitality code of Nostalgia, designed for these customers, can be defined by the following '3U's':
Uncharted (never attempted), Unexpected (no one expected it), Unwilling (no one wanted to do it).
--- From "Chapter 2 Building: The Usefulness of Hanok Beyond the Everyday Life of Housing"

It is unusual to run a 100-year-old hanok as a hotel in the heart of Seoul.
The experience of staying overnight in a heritage-listed building with modern amenities is a rare one.
It's the experience of sleeping under a half-height ceiling and listening to the sound of rain falling on blue tiles handcrafted by the same tile craftsman who created the roof tiles of the Blue House.
Also, wearing a traditional hanbok created by a master hanbok artist instead of a regular rental hanbok, drinking tea while listening to gayageum performances, and inviting foreign embassy staff to a dinner in a hanok are all experiences that are not easily available at a 'hanok hotel.'
--- From "Chapter 2 Building: The Usefulness of Hanok Beyond the Everyday Life of Housing"

I think perfection is about fitting myself into the world's standards, and breaking new ground is about creating my own standards.
Perfection is safe but ordinary, and unconventional is risky but special.
This uniqueness is a powerful growth tool that will help us navigate through uncertain times.
People who strive for perfection follow established formulas for success.
We follow the path that others have made in the name of benchmarking.
But those who pursue innovation create paths no one has taken.
Create a unique experience for your customers, even if it means sacrificing profitability.
Even if the operation is complex and difficult, we design services that cannot be imitated anywhere else.
--- From "Chapter 2 Building 'Dreaming of Aman, but Not Imitating Aman'"

The most important thing I kept in mind while planning Slowjae was to make staying at Slowjae a complete journey in itself.
This is in line with Aman's secret to global success.
Just as Aman was recognized for its luxury by breaking down the boundaries of accommodation and embodying the value of tranquility in its space, Slowjae also wanted to open up a new horizon of experience by embodying the 'density of time' in its space.
--- From "Chapter 2 Building 'A new world unfolds when you open just one door: Slowjae'"

Managing Nostalgia's unique operational complexities required a completely different system than a typical hotel.
What was needed was a three-dimensional system that could connect non-adjacent Hanoks to create a reasonable route, rather than the vertical system of a typical hotel or the horizontal system of a resort.
--- From "Chapter 2 Building 'System is Survival'"

Nostalgia's internally shared brand slogan is 'Expect Exceptional', meaning 'Make people expect amazing experiences.'
This doctrine is rooted in the human psyche, which is not aware of its own desires.
In fact, 'Expect Exceptional' is a phrase that Branding.com developed as the brand slogan for Incheon Airport, but it is now being used as the business model slogan for Nostalgia.
The result of this nostalgia that embodies this slogan is the Welcome Center.
When you think of the information desk at a Hanok hotel, you usually picture an elderly person wearing a Hanbok welcoming you with a “welcome,” but the reality is completely different.
A blue-eyed foreign welcome master who speaks English well and Korean even better will systematically serve you at the hotel-level front desk.
The reaction from first-time customers is consistent.
“Huh? This kind of service in a traditional Korean house?” At this very moment, in the gap between expectation and reality, the customer experiences a positive surprise.
--- From "Chapter 2 Building 'System is Survival'"

When discussing brands, I focus on how heritage connects to present-day values.
If tradition is confined to museum displays, it is nothing more than a relic of the past.
However, it is only when that value is reinterpreted in contemporary language and incorporated into people's daily lives that it gains vitality.
This is exactly what I focused on while planning the Hanok Hotel Nostalgia.
I call this attempt to recreate and expand upon tradition in today's context without damaging its essence "new heritage."

--- From "Chapter 3 Digging 'Can Gahoe-dong Become Porto?'"