Hydroil
Brand identity
2017

Making a leader visible

Refreshing a legacy brand and finding a new voice.

Brand Profiling, brand evolution and brand narrative.

What’s always fascinating starting a new project is getting detailed insight into the operations and history of a business and an industry that we have had no prior experience with. Within a short space of time and the client’s implicit trust we move from novice to insider and through the brand Profiling process are able to generate deep and valuable insight for the business owners and management that creates certainty and invigorates business decisions.

Beginning our work with Hydroil we worked with the CEO through a collaborative Brand Profiling process to capture a 360º perspective of the business and its market. This work detailed the positioning of the business, the state of its market and key competitors and pinpointed the value generated through its services and products. This background work led quickly to an appreciation of requirements for the brand and the beginnings of a brand narrative that would inform the development of a website and other communication collateral.

We discovered that Hydroil is one of the large quiet achievers of South Australia. Of significant scale, long standing operations over 50 years, leaders in innovative engineering solutions, operating nationally and a primary resource for large scale equipment operating in the mining sector. The role of brand is to communicate the value within a business and with this clearly defined we were able to make an objective assessment of the current brand. We could see clearly that the brand wasn’t broken but simply that it didn’t adequately represent the value and positioning of the business.

The existing Hydroil brand had presented a range of issues for the team. Practically it was difficult to reproduce with poor legibility at small scale and significantly it lacked the quiet confidence of a successful company operating at scale. A critical element of brand evolution is the migration of goodwill associated with the brand. Irrespective of how well it works or doesn’t, that mark in its current form is an identifier for a large customer base – its their link to the company.

Our early tasks then were focused on identifying the critical visual elements within the brand – that make it what it is. Interrogating this and working through a series of studies and prototypes we resolved a set of elements at the core of the brand and defined clearly the non-essential elements. From this information set and understanding the parameters of a successful brand for Hydroil we were able to work swiftly through to completed design.

We see market positioning as the greatest indicator of value and behaviour as the greatest indicator of positioning. Through the brand work for Hydroil we were successful in evolving a brand that brought with it the goodwill within its market and re-established a mark that speaks of the behaviour of the business. Of a quiet and understated confidence. Of reliability. Of trust. For the owners and operators of large scale machinery throughout the country these are highly valued attributes.

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