Over the last two years, we’ve learned a lot about our brand, process, and team. Since we value transparency, we wanted to take a moment and reflect on what we’ve learned.
Over the last two years, we’ve learned a lot about our brand, process, and team. Since we value transparency, we wanted to take a moment and reflect on what we’ve learned.
One of the main reasons that we first ventured on our own brand adventure was that we were experiencing a brand gap. We had spent the last ten years finding our niche of being a branding agency, and with the name “Armstrong Marketing Solutions,” we often had folks calling us for solely marketing projects, like social media management, and not branding. While we often work with our clients to help them execute their brand through traditional marketing and advertising, everything is grounded in branding.
By rebranding AMS to Hardy Brands, we have waved goodbye to the brand gap that we were facing. We refocused our brand to center around our bread and butter, branding. Since doing this, we have been able to connect with folks that are excited to invest in their own success through strategy.
An exciting result of our rebrand is the creation of lasting partnerships that evolve over the years. Once done, your brand guidelines should not be tossed in a drawer and forgotten. Instead, these are living, breathing projects that evolve with market changes and time.
With our rebrand, we have strengthened our position as a strategic partner. Instead of just stopping after a brand scope of work, we work with our clients and find ways our team can help with their unique needs.
By creating a foundation in branding, we have had the pleasure of becoming a strategic partner to clients like Genuine Ice Cream beyond their initial brand scope. For Genuine, we helped them grow their business by designing their packaging suite, marketing, gear, and even the interior of their new space.
One of the biggest lessons we learned throughout this process has been patience.
Updating your brand is so much more than just switching out the fonts, colors, and logos on documents. Instead, we recommend looking at every single branded asset with a critical eye and updating verbiage to match your voice and tone, and using your brand pillars as guardrails to ensure things continue to be on-brand.
For us, that meant going through all of our tools. Over the last ten years, Hardy has developed many processes, templates, checklists, and workbooks that make up what we do on a daily basis. When it came to updating every single document, it took some time, and we are not talking about a couple of months. We are talking about over a year of chipping away at these templates. We even still sometimes find an errant AMS in a document.
It can be very easy to get frustrated that not everything is immediately updated, but Rome was not built in a day. By having grace and patience with each other, our team has been able to assess our processes and create templates and tools to make us more efficient and a better partner to our clients.
So, if you take one thing away from this blog, please be patient and kind to yourself.
We always recommend clients use their brand as a culture-building tool. Especially your brand pillars. These are a great way to filter candidates that not only can do the job description but will fit in culturally. Fitting in culturally does not mean that every single person is the same. Actually, in fact, our strongest asset at Hardy is our very eclectic team.
Each person, whether they are fresh out of college or have +20 years of experience, brings a unique skill set, personality, and point of view. When hiring, we intentionally bring on new team members that align with our brand. Making our team clever, gritty, and most importantly, not boring. Every member of Hardy is unique and excited about helping our clients succeed through branding.
Brands are meant to evolve. The moment your brand stops evolving and becomes stagnant is when you start becoming irrelevant.
Recently, our team had a chance to envision what we want Hardy to become in the next few years. Don't worry, we are still going to be focusing on helping companies achieve their goals through strategic brands.
Our team is wanting to have a greater impact on our community, and we have a very exciting announcement coming up. Mum's the word on what exactly we're planning, but keep your eyes peeled.
Evolving your brand is not limited to big, exciting announcements, however. It can include things like updating the language on your website. In the past couple of months, our team overhauled the copy and content on our site. If you haven't had a chance yet, after you finish this blog take a look through our expertise pages to check out some of the updates.
We’re not going to sugarcoat it for you, the past two years have been hard. Even though it has been difficult, our rebrand has absolutely been worth it.
If you’re ready to start trekking on your brand journey let us know. With first-hand experience, we are your guide to lead you where you need to go, at every step of the journey – even after the branding scope is over.
We are here to help you find success through strategy.
Like our work, the Hardy Brands team is an embodiment of the perfect balance of strategy and creative. We’ve cultivated a team of certified brand specialists and strategists, designers, copywriters and marketing professionals who are ferocious about helping you succeed. We’re a Montana marketing agency that will constantly strive to improve your business.
As a branding, marketing and design agency, we partner with all types of businesses, from restaurants and breweries to building and real estate professionals, nonprofits to accountants and many others. Get a better idea of who we are and what we do by visiting our Work page.
