Frequently Asked Questions

Hardy Brands is a process-oriented design & branding agency. We follow a scaffolding system for just about every service we provide. Meaning, we have a series of defined steps that we incrementally work through to achieve desired results. Clients approve milestones before we move on to the next steps.  

You’re involved with our team and our processes, transparently and collaboratively, throughout. This way, you’re a part of defining what we are doing throughout the entire process. If you have worked with other branding agencies, it is likely you will find the Hardy Brands process to be more defined, collaborative, and hands-on. We also put an emphasis on proactive communications so you know up-front who your main point of contact will be the project timeline and the major milestones associated with keeping the project moving forward.

From a strategic level as a design & branding agency, our focus is on doing what’s best for you and your brand to help you succeed. We do this by working with our clients to build powerful brands. During the process, we teach you what branding is and what you can do to build and manage your business’s reputation long-term.

We have had the opportunity to work as the design & branding agency for a huge range of businesses. But we see that companies with a high amount of customer interactions and touchpoints have the best opportunities to see a stronger return from investing in the help of a branding agency.

While Hardy Brands is based in Bozeman, Montana, we work with businesses throughout the country, specifically in the Rocky Mountain West. Through online tools, we successfully collaborate with clients from coast to coast and everywhere in between, no matter where they are located. 

Marketing agencies plan and manage marketing campaigns. Marketing campaigns typically include advertising geared towards catching the attention of that company’s customers.

As a branding agency, the work we do provides direction for everything a company does. Branding sets guidelines for how a business makes decisions, trains its staff, and interacts with its customers (this is where our marketing agency status comes from). Our focus, prior to developing concepts for effective marketing campaigns, is on developing a plan to improve your reputation and create long-term, real value for your customers. Once we know the plan, we can execute your brand through marketing and advertising methods.

Your brand is how people perceive you. Branding is the foundation of a business or organization. It sets the tone and positions the brand within the market. This helps to identify a company and distinguish it from other products and services.

It is planning and strategizing for who your business or organization is and where it wants to go. It impacts business growth decisions, such as whether or not to add a new product or service, as well as how your staff behaves and treats your customers.

Brand strategy combines the things you do, why you do them, why they matter to you, who you do them for and why it matters to them to give you a path forward. It is your company’s approach to doing business and how that makes you different from your competitors. The purpose of brand strategy is to define all of this so your organization has focus. It is your guiding tool to measure all of your future actions against.

There isn’t a formula, but here are a few things to consider:
1. Lifetime Customer Value: For your organization to grow, do you need to retain customers?
2. Referrals: Is word of mouth a primary driver for new customers?
3. Perception: Do your customers make their purchase decisions based on what they think of you?
4. Trust: Is it important that your customers trust you to provide what they’re looking for?

If the answer is yes to any of these, then it is time to put resources into branding. 

Ask yourself, would it benefit your business to have a better reputation or for your customers to have a consistent experience with your company? People don’t trust advertising; people trust people. So instead of focusing on communicating your benefit (advertising), focus on improving how your customers think about you (branding).

Branding is important for a business because it provides the business with a roadmap to help it make decisions, strategically position itself within the market and help differentiate it from its competitors. Branding provides consistency and helps businesses improve their customers’ experiences. This gives businesses the advantage of having customers that feel positive enough to promote the company to their own network of people.

EVERYTHING. You need to be thinking of all decisions in terms of whether or not they align with your brand’s position, its values, and its identity. Brand defines how a business behaves and what it looks like. By using your brand as your guide to decision-making, you’ll know whether your actions will help or hurt your brand’s reputation.

Yes! The core of web design is brand messaging (communicating your brand’s values) paired with user experience needs (what your customer expects from your website). A branding agency has the closest connection to your values and understands what your customers need to be satisfied. They did the work to help you discover your brand’s essence and who it best serves. Because of this deep understanding, a brand agency will be able to make strategic decisions about how to best bring your business to life online in a way that properly represents you and supports your customer’s needs.

We are brand specialists and your web design is a huge part of your brand’s identity. It is also likely to be the first introduction a potential customer has with your services or products. If you already have a brand, are refining one, or are starting new, your web design is where you can convey that brand. It’s an opportunity to show your customers how you do business, what makes you different, and, above all, a place for your customers to be delighted with their initial experience with you.

Going through a branding process will identify how to do those things. And, if you’ve worked with us to develop your brand, we know it better than anyone else. Your brand strategy informs everything we do–from your user’s experience expectations and functionality of your web design to the fonts, words, colors, images, and content organization. Web design informed through the lens of brand strategy improve the reputation of that business.

Your website is the primary online presence that represents your brand ecosystem. For example, if a large part of your ecosystem feels like being on farmland and another part feels like being in the mountains, your customer will feel confused. Thus, causing them to lose trust in who you say you are and what you say you do. The key to branding is to take every opportunity you can to build trust. This requires web design that consistently represents your business’s offerings, its values, and its personality through words, imagery, fonts, and colors in a way that accurately shows your customers who you are. Developing an on-brand website also helps you create and maintain the reputation you want your business to have.

Pro Tip: The Logo Test. If you remove your logo from your web design, would others be able to tell that it is your brand’s website? If not, it is not on-brand. For more info, check out this blog.

From a brand perspective, the most important thing is that it feels like your brand and that it communicates your brand’s value. The part that makes it good or bad is your branding. The rest of what makes a good or bad website is more on the development side. Is the site easy to use and easy to find? Does it do what you expect? Does it help you do what you need to do? Does it load quickly and is it secure? All of these things effect your brand reputation making them important.

Yes, you should have a logo on your website, but you don’t need to design a new logo for a new website. If you have an existing logo you should be able to use it. The caveat is whether your logo is good. Ask yourself these questions to determine whether it is good. Does it represent your company appropriately? Does it feel outdated? Do the fonts, colors, photography, and words align with the vibe of your company?

If you answered “no” to any of these, it’s likely time for a new logo. If you don’t have a logo, be sure to keep these same questions in mind and have it designed before you start on web design so the visuals of your site match your logo. For more on what makes a logo good, check out this blog.

Marketing strategy, in its simplest form, is a plan for promoting your business. There are a few key components it should include:

1. Three to four marketing goals.

2. A list of the most likely ways to get in front of your audience based on where they are and what they’re paying attention to.

3. A plan for measuring your marketing to make sure your efforts are helping you reach your goals.

4. The dollar amount you can allocate to your marketing. This should include any out-of-pocket costs such as paid media fees, printing fees, and creative services. If you’re hiring other people to design ads or promotional materials, include those costs in your budget.

Research is a huge part of our process. We start every project by determining the goal of the market research. This allows us to choose the method of research and help us select questions. We typically will use an assortment of qualitative questions on top of standard marketing scales.

At Hardy Brands our market research includes online competitive audits, market position mapping, customer identification through persona building, customer/employees surveys, instore/in-person user testing and anything else we can do to validate our next steps so that we can more confidently predict the success of marketing initiatives.

We are media agnostic. We put your brand’s message wherever your customers are and for the lowest cost and deepest impact. Digital, traditional, social, video…if it makes the short list based on the media your audience is paying attention to and it’s a good channel to share your brand’s message, we’ll provide the recommended marketing spend and we’re happy to develop the advertising assets needed. Of course, we will discuss the costs to create those ads prior to working on anything.

Determining goals and measurable objectives for your marketing efforts.
Media Strategy (research and planning)
Media Execution (price negotiations and buying)
Creative Strategy (concept and messaging)
Creative Execution (development of all advertising assets needed)
Cross-channel Analytics and Reporting
Project Management
Consulting
Reporting

We focus on the core elements of your brand and your goals and consider what will connect with your audience when we develop creative assets. We are calculated in the decisions we make so that your brand is represented accurately and consistently.

Everything we do is strategic. It’s never about shooting from the hip and hoping it sticks. Because of this, your reach naturally expands as your audience begins to become familiar with you and connects to your brand. You’ll see an increase in engagement, an increase in word-of-mouth referrals and, ultimately, an increase in long-term loyalty and trust.

If you’re looking for new ways to reach people, we also offer marketing strategy and execution.

There are limitless creative services at a marketer’s disposal. The goal of marketing is to sell more and continue to do it better. You should never let your concepts for how to do that be limited by the medium. Creative services, at their core, are the result of combining writing with visual art/design.

The range is huge: videography, photography, illustration, script writing, guidelines to follow for sales calls, press releases, graphic design, experience design, web design, print collateral design, branded videos and more. The creative services needed to market a business varies by business based on the types of media their customers respond to best and the marketing message the business is hoping to share.

For example, if a local furniture store is having a store-wide sale, a simple attention-getting ad on social media or in the local newspaper would require graphic design and copywriting creative services. If a company is launching a new and somewhat complicated product, they may want to create a video to showcase the value the product offers and how to use it. This would, at a minimum, require a videographer and a script writer. It may also involve actors, set design, music and a creative director, which also fall under creative services.

We don’t have a limit on what we create. If you can think of it, we can develop it. But, we don’t often take on projects without doing brand strategy and brand identity work first. We specialize in brand strategy, brand identity design, and brand execution. Our approach is strategic and intentional. This is what makes us more versatile compared to most other creative teams.

No. “Creative services” is the overarching term for all types of creative work (copywriting, graphic design, photography, illustration, videography, script writing, etc.). You could think of it as communication services–anything that transfers or contains information, including sound, smell, taste, and visual communication. Graphic design is only the design of visual communications components where graphics, words, and/or images are paired together to share information. A few common examples of graphic design are posters, print ads, and business cards.