LONDON — Italian papermaker and product designer Moleskine has appointed Burson Cohn & Wolfe as its global communications agency.

Starting in August, BCW’s London team will lead public relations and influencer relations and serve as Moleskine’s global hub for 12 countries. The remit includes global earned media creative ideation, influencer strategy and relations, and senior stakeholder profiling.

The agency’s brief is to promote Moleskine’s products, from its iconic notebooks to its new range of backpacks and the M+ digital range. Its campaigns will also communicate the company’s new brand positioning: ‘M is for Movers,’ which encapsulates Moleskine’s belief that “anyone has the capacity to create, with the right tools.”

BCW has also won the Moleskine business in Hong Kong and will be working with other agency partners across Europe, including Citizen in the UK – the brand’s previous global agency – Styleheads in Germany and Probeat in Italy. In other markets, the agency will be working alongside Moleskine's in-house teams.

Edward Green, managing director of consumer brand marketing at BCW, told the Holmes Report: “It’s a really exciting brand for us. BCW has a huge heritage in earned ideas and we’ll also be rolling out our Trufluence model to make sure the influencer work really will be delivering. As well as looking at more partnerships, like the ones Moleskine already has with Warner Brothers and Marvel, we’ll be building more brand-owned activities that can be tailored for each market.”

Moleskine brand development director Simona Sbarbaro said: “We are very pleased to be partnering with BCW, an agency renowned for its creative thinking and its unique ability to connect with people, values that reflect the Moleskine core philosophy. I am confident that our journey together will be fruitful and inspiring.”

The Milan-based brand joins other BCW consumer clients across its technology, travel, lifestyle and health teams, including Lavazza, which it picked up earlier this year, Campari Group, Unilever (Comfort and Dove), Barclaycard, Heineken, Japanese sex toy company Tenga, Hotels.com and Colgate, as well as working as part of the WPP team that handles the Centrica account.