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.
The 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.
The Solution
Before any design work was undertaken Veucom worked with Hardide 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.
A series of graphic devices was devised to be used throughout the branded communications. This utilised the two new colours and consisted of flowing graphic lines and pictures positioned inside irregular curved flowing shapes, representing the swirling, gaseous phase of the Hardide coating process. Clean, white space was also used widely to create a more technical and scientific perception.
The design featured the new colour way and supporting graphic styling to ensure brand recognition and aesthetic consistency with all other marketing communications. The website content was optimised so that the key search words and terms provided the best possible results. This successfully produced several number 1 positions in search engine rankings.
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.
