Before any design can happen, strategy should happen. BrandHardware views strategic planning as the critical component to any project’s success. From developing new brands for companies to modernizing an existing brand’s essence, BrandHardware provides the research and strategy necessary to accomplish your business objectives.
We discover how your brand lives in the minds of your stakeholders, assess its effectiveness and reshape it into a new brand proposition that captures the essence of who you are, what your purpose is, and how to take it to market. Done properly, the right brand strategy will capture the hearts of your customers, investors, partners and employees alike.
To start, we take a look at the history, accomplishments, current strategy, culture and personality of your organization. We examine all of your communications (corporate and marketing), business objectives and marketing strategy. We interview senior executives, internal and external stakeholders and key customers. We look at how effectively your name and reputation lives in the heart of your customers and the market today. And finally, we examine your competitors to see what their strategies include. We then shape all the information we’ve compiled into a new way of communicating who you are and your raison d’être to the world.
Improving a website’s usability and user experience does in fact drive business, but you also have to ensure that it aligns to your brand to guarantee that you are maximizing the web as an effective communications channel with your customers. Analyzing your corporate website against a user experience and usability best practice approach, as well as to a defined brand strategy will ensure that the end result is a site that accomplishes your business goals. Whether those goals are to raise brand awareness, increase sales, profit margins, market share, stock performance, competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, or customer loyalty having a strategy that aligns the web experience to the brand experience will ultimately ensure that your website adds value to your organization.
In interviews with Forrester Research, decision makers from 148 different Fortune 500 companies stated that usability, ensuring user goals and web alignment to their brand were their top three must-haves in their website redesign strategy.
Using studies and research on maximizing brand experience for the web, as well as interface usability and user experience design from Forrester Research (the leading think-tank in the world on web and information technology research), we have compiled our own analysis tool for accessing website usability and effectiveness. It compiles some 31 individual factors, from layout and design, to interactivity, to navigational structure to assess the effectiveness of your website. The analysis is compiled from senior web designers and developers who specialize in web usability and user experience. We then augment it with our own criteria on brand effectiveness to provide you the most comprehensive web usability analysis available. It will provide you with feedback to improve your web experience, analyze vulnerabilities and provide you with suggestions to make it a more significant and compelling experience to ultimately improve your brand and your company’s bottom-line.
Research provides the foundation; strategy leads to new ideas and ultimately a better way to look at your business and connect with your customers. From our research, we create a brand that your organization will use to speak to the world. It will define and differentiate you from your competitors and provide you with a distinct business advantage.
We tackle conceptualizing your brand in a new light. Just as every great building begins with a blueprint, your brand is no different. This blueprint will outline and create the personality and voice of your company. It will compile a new brand nomenclature and provide the basis for subsequent visual identity design and visual communications guidelines for your organization (logo applications, logo guidelines, logo types, colours, fonts, image styles, etc). It will serve as the foundation of your new brand and all your future marketing communications.
Still want more? Please see our section entitled “How will a brand improve my industry standing”, click here.
Before you can create a visual identity or logo for your company or product, you first need a name that aligns to your brand strategy. It needs to be unique, powerful, impactful and convey the meaning of the brand. Not a small task. BrandHardware strategists compile the essence of your brand and distill it down into a simple, singular term that will not only create meaning for your brand, but will do so in a very powerful way. At a glance, your audience will already have a sense of who you are, what you are about and what is to come. We will further create a tagline, a single phrase that adds even more clarity and purpose to your brand and your business.
Creative is the transformation of strategy into a visual presence that enunciates and illuminates the meaning of your brand using an aligned visual language.
For more than 15 years, the creative visionaries behind BrandHardware have provided companies and organizations with the tools to create visually rich expressions of their brands. With stunning visual identities, web and interactive design, marketing communications, corporate image advertising, environmental design and annual reports, we have provided companies with award-winning tools to power their brands and help them be the best they can be.
In this day and age, the creative function also means producing requirements for our customers that are more environmentally responsible and sustainable. BrandHardware is committed to protecting the environment around us. To learn more, please see our environmental section entitled “Environmental by design”, click here.
The first visual element your brand should possess is a unique, compelling and meaningful visual identity (or logo). It is the visual expression, the first clue your customers have of your brand. It needs to speak clearly to who you are and what you are about as a company. It should provide visual linkages into your name and the elements your brand possesses. It should speak visually to the essence of your company and tell the world that you are a presence to take notice of.
In today’s global marketplace, the web is one of the most cost-effective means of getting your message out to your customers and the world. It is also one of the most powerful. It has the power to attract and command. It is also often the first impression, the first window your customers will use to look into your world, so it must be on-strategy and on-brand. It can advertise who you are and give your customers the ability to view and physically control their portion of your world.
Your website plays a major role in promoting ideas and driving behavior. You can sell from it, buy from it and learn from it. It must be compelling, intuitive, easy-to-use and also meet the demands of users regardless of who they are, be they current or prospective customers, shareholders, partners or employees.
Regardless of your business application, BrandHardware has the technology expertise to help you build the success for your online brand. We’ve helped companies build social media sites (blogs) to showcase their knowledge management, portals and content management applications to manage their content. We can even build dynamically-driven eCommerce sites to get your products online and across the globe. Regardeless of the application, we can build the technology, interface and user experience you need to maximize your brand’s effectiveness.
From marketing brochures to product one-pagers, your marketing literature is an essential part of your brand — it speaks for you when you cannot. Using all the tools available — images, words, tone and message — BrandHardware combines them into a value proposition that explains your essence and your business strategy in a way that captures the hearts and minds of your customers. It is a very powerful thing.
All companies (like products) need to get their message out into the marketplace. What gives you the advantage is tying that advertising into the root of who you are — your brand. At BrandHardware we create unique, powerful, and compelling advertisements that help companies create or change brand perceptions or awareness. They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. If that is the case, our creative staff should be ecstatic from the attention they have received over the years. Whatever your requirements — indoor, outdoor, magazine, newspaper — we have the talent and expertise to communicate your brand in ways you never thought possible.
The way you project your brand on paper or through the web is no different from how you should display yourself in a three-dimensional world. Whether it is a tradeshow display, signage or, more importantly, your own corporate offices, your brand should be well integrated throughout. Your corporate environment does and should speak volumes to your customers about your values, personality, culture and business status. It speaks to your brand without having to say a word, and if words are used, they should be aligned to your brand strategy. The result will be a memorable environment that captures the hearts and minds of your customers, employees and shareholders. It will further act to reinforce the importance and your commitment to your brand, creating another differentiator between you and your competitors.
Employing the same methodology that we use in our brand development program to our annual report practice, we:
Concept and Design — From our compiled research, we tell the most compelling story we can. We tell the world who you are, what you are best at, and why you are the solid performer in your industry. We create a thought-provoking and compelling narrative coupled with stunning visual design that tells your story. Because we are a branding firm and not a boutique creative or advertising firm, strong emphasis is given to strategy to ensure that the end-result, in both narrative and visual expression, is brand-aligned across all media. With those customers for whom we maintain their brand presence, we consider the annual report an important touchpoint in ensuring that their brand message is being heard and understood with their customers, stakeholders, partners and employees alike.
Quality-Assured Production and Guidance — After creative is done, production kicks in. As with any project we touch, accuracy in every detail, regardless of how small, is vital. BrandHardware manages all aspects of the production process: from concept sign-off, to on-press supervision and delivery. We take the burden and stress from you. It is our world: we know it inside out. Trust it to the people who know it best.
Creating a brand is one process, but maintaining it is an entirely different undertaking. Implementing a brand takes more than logo repositories and usage rules. It means communicating with and educating executives and employees about your brand’s value and its importance. We help you explain the reasoning behind the brand, as well as how your new identity incorporates that brand, so that it can begin to grow and flourish throughout your organization. We revitalize the branding exercise into something more captivating and meaningful for your customers and employees. We explain to them how it works, how it will work for them, why visual identity guidelines matter and also introduce the tools (organic and digital) that we have made available to help.
A brand reaches your customers through a variety of channels. Maintaining a consistent expression of that brand is imperative to its success. Comprehensive guidelines ensure that your brand message remains cohesive across all your communications channels and media. It should act as the common voice or glue to your brand communications network. If your current brand guidelines are lacking in some way, or do not seem to be effective in guiding your creative agency or staff, we can help you make them more encompassing and ultimately more effective.
The successful implementation of a brand is hard, challenging and can consist of items senior executives cannot anticipate or even imagine. BrandHardware can handle the logistics of launching your brand and making it a success across your organization and your client base. From event planning, to inviting world-renowned speakers, signage, promotional items, print, even scripting what you need to say to the troups, BrandHardware will launch your brand with the impact you need to succeed.
Then, once the launch is done, we change our focus on managing the brand across your organization. Take, for example, the logistics of managing signage requirements or tradeshow displays and events across regions or across the globe. Perhaps the challenge would be to help you convert literally thousands of forms, product one-pagers, corporate brochures, stationery and other marketing into the digital world so that it is more cost-effective and easily distributed. We have converted it into an opportunity to improve process and drastically reduce costs. BrandHardware has 15 years of experience implementing and managing complex brands, you can trust us with yours.
For too long, we have noticed that boutique firms do not have the IT experience required to complete the projects they’ve been given. And their IT counterparts don’t have the capability or experience to blend award-winning creative with an extensive IT function. Recognizing this vacuum within our industry, we created our own mini–information technology firm within BrandHardware. We are, however, not arrogant enough to say that we know all in the world of IT; but, we have focused our technology offering on web content management, web media, social media, dynamic brand integration technologies like Web-to-print and Targeted Communication.
Reducing your marketing expenses is a dream of virtually every organization. The trade-off, however, can be maintaining the quality and integrity of your brand. Using the Microsoft Office Suite, the world's most adopted office productivity software, BrandHardware can create a customized, easy-to-use collateral system (automated or otherwise) so you can self-manage and update your marketing communications and sales materials (e.g., product sheets, case studies, white papers, RFPs). It’s a system that you can distribute to your entire organization — employees, suppliers and business partners — to ensure that your brand message remains intact.
Websites have grown in size almost exponentially since their inception 15 years ago and can consist of thousands of pages across multiple languages, sometimes including sub-sites and web applications. Maintaining them can be a daunting challenge for any organization and delivering an on-brand experience through all that, quite often, never happens. BrandHardware’s experience integrating brands with content management and portal technologies can ease this burden for you.
The world of content management has changed dramatically. It has extended itself even to the world of social media (blogs).There are many more options available to the end customer today than just enterprise-grade content management systems (CMS). BrandHardware offers solutions at various price points and capabilities to address your needs. Whatever your requirements, we have a solution that will fit with your budgetary and technical needs.
Our technology set can also include the development and deployment of your own web-based brand portal engine. Imagine it. A web environment from which you can edit, manage and control all your marketing and communication assets. From corporate stationery to product sheets and your corporate brochure, you will be in control of their lifecycle. Customize business cards and letterhead, reorder envelopes, add a custom message to a thank you card — you can do it all from our web-to-print engine. Print to your localized colour device or order 5,000 copies and have them shipped overnight via courier for an event. You have complete control over all your print communications. You can eliminate the need for large inventories of marketing document and stationery. Get up-to-the-second levels on quantities so you can reorder, or just set it up to automatically reorder for you.
At BrandHardware, we use the power of the web to power your brand in ways you never thought possible or imaginable.