Hardide Coatings is the leading global innovator and provider of advanced tungsten carbide coatings that significantly increase the life of critical metal parts. They have production facilities in Oxfordshire UK and Virginia USA and service a number of industries including aerospace, oil & gas and power generation.

Challenge
The original Hardide brand had proved extremely successful, being implemented from the company outset and serving to put them on the international stage for their industry.
Like all brands, however, it required a refresh. In this case to create a new customer proposition, meet the needs of new management and to facilitate a successful new business drive with the creation of a new, fresher looking range of marketing communication.
The challenge was to ensure the great results of the existing brand were not undone by the newly refreshed brand.

Solution
Before any design work was undertaken Veucom worked with Hardide Coatings to create a brand new Customer Proposition to ensure that a consistent accurate message was produced.
Veucom then took the decision to subtly change the Hardide brand with the introduction of a new colour way and implementing new look graphic devices throughout the entire marketing communications.
The following operational marketing disciplines were then exercised to implement the successful brand refresh:

The new website performance was extremely impressive from the moment it was launched.
The new website performance was extremely impressive from the moment it was launched.
website users
page views
of more than a million results*
website visitors
Data representative of first three months post website launch Google Analytics. * Key industry search terms including ‘Hard Chrome Replacement’, ‘wear resistant coating’ and ‘internal surface coating’.
Outcome
The new designs for the brand refresh provided a much fresher, distinctive and more technical appearance to the company, receiving much praise from Hardide plc board members and their customers.
The new website provided immediate excellent results. Within the first three months of being live, website users had increased by a huge 267% over the previous three month period. Important key search terms, such as ‘hard chrome replacement’, ‘wear resistant coating’ and ‘internal surface coating’ achieved the number one spot in Google search results.
The brand refresh exercise had an impact on boosting marketing led enquiries, with the new website generating a regular flow of sales enquiries via the online enquiry contact form.
The continuing brand-led marketing activity has proven extremely successful, with the awareness and promotion of Hardide Coatings technology leading to new client gains and further company investment.
