Navigating A Brand
Black Hills, Inc. Heating and Air Conditioning, rebranded as Black Hills Home Services, is a $13m company with over 60 employees focusing on Heating, Air Conditioning, Plumbing, and Electrical. I was brought in to develop and manage their branding and it’s related facets as it pertains to marketing, design, and communications. I was also tasked to assist with marketing, copywriting, and generally do design related work.
While I began to immediately do the needed design work, I also began the evaluation process of understanding Black Hills position and equity. This began by trying to understand what the company had been doing so far and how it aligned with their mission and services.
There was a lot going on. This graphic encapsulates the visual identity and branding for Black Hills in 2018 well. Their fleet of vehicles had 3 variations of a Black Hills word mark and a vast lack of consistency with anything their visual branding touched. The Captain Comfort graphic was dated and offered little flexibility.
The identity was updated within the constraints (including keeping the logo mark) at the time. New vehicle wraps for the fleet were also designed, with limited options for variation available (per constraints).
The result of the process leading to the starting point of developing brand solutions was the development of a full marketing plan for the company, as none had previously existed.
There is a strong polarization between ownership, mission, employees and company culture, the demands of the market, and the customer. While the company does stellar work in their services to their customers, the polarization is a narrative that was evident in my evaluation.
The solution was to work with ownership and his vision for the company based on what he wanted as a starting point. From there I looked to the mission and the relationship between employees, service, and customer experience and relationship. Only then could the brand begin to be shaped/realigned.
The visual communication was streamlined to represent the Super Service Black Hills provides, giving cohesion and a sense of pride and unity to the company.
The traditional way to know any company is through a simple, well designed, clearly communicating brochure like this.
These Homeowner's guides were for use by technicians to more easily explain various issues a home comfort unit may have.
Base template sample for one page ads.
Five different versions of this Super Service Guide were created for use by technicians and the sales team in the field.
Recruiting events included full assortment of table display design work, including table decore, swag, brochures, and flyers like this.
Ownership preferred mail as the primary form of marketing for Black Hills. The previous oversized postcard mailer was replaced with a more engaging design like this.
Connecting the customer to the Black Hills mascot was important for our representation out in the community. Baseball cards like these were a fun form of swag, as Captain Comfort could be seen at the Tacoma Rainiers baseball games.
Black Hills relied on customer retention. The Service Superhero Chronicle was incredible important to ownership in this respect. A good amount of research not only into membership psychographics, but into sales focused newsletter content and design resulted in a quarterly newsletter that was both effective and engaging.
Club membership retention was important to keeping a customer base, as services were expected to last the lifetime and beyond of the home comfort system Black Hills installed. The Service Superhero Chronicle was the focal point of connection to Service Club members.
