Hallstar unveils new branding, website

CLEVELAND—Hallstar Co., a global manufacturer of specialty chemicals, debuted its new branding at the Rubber Division's International Elastomer Conference and Rubber Expo, held Oct. 13-15 in Cleveland.

The branding campaign consists of a responsive web design, trade show display, an updated logo and tagline.

The website (www.hallstar.com) officially went live Sept. 21, said Karin Wennerstrom, senior director of global marketing and strategy for Hallstar. The new branding was displayed for the first time at the show.

Although the branding recently went live, the change was a long time coming, she said.

“When launching a new website, we really wanted to get back down to the foundation and the fundamentals of our branding to see if ... what we were doing really made sense, if it resonated and people understood it,” Wennerstrom said.

Recognizing the company has become more global, Hallstar wanted a better way to reach out and show what makes it “unique and differentiated” as well as having a better market presence.

“I think it was a natural evolution of our business. I would say over the past five years or so, we've become increasingly global, and we realized that we really needed to do a better job of marketing ourselves and reaching our current and potential customers,” she said. One recent global initiative is the company's recent acquisition of Fortinbras, a specialty chemical manufacturer based in Sao Paulo. The purchase of Fortinbras increases Hallstar's presence in the fast growing emerging market of Brazil and greater Latin American region, the company said. Both companies share an expertise in ester chemistry.

Beyond expanding globally, creating a more user-friendly website was a big part of the company's evolution. The firm had not launched anything new on the website for awhile and realized with the heightened use of mobile phones and tablets, a change was necessary.

Hallstar has a smaller staff, Wennerstrom said, so it thought the best use of its resources would be to put it into a new branding campaign and website.

Prior to the launch, Hallstar worked with Chicago-based Moveo, a marketing and branding firm, to take a year-long look at what branding was working, what was failing and getting advice on how to move forward.

Hallstar focuses on the industrial and beauty and personal care markets. It also serves some customers in other niche sectors, such as household and agriculture.

Moveo started the process by examining current marketing materials and customer interfacing tools Hallstar uses.

“They also interviewed a large portion of our team, both on the commercial side of the business, as well as in R&D and product development and operations and quality in areas that are very important to our business to help us be successful,” Wennerstrom said.

Once it got that internal view, Moveo did “a series of qualitative and quantitative interviews with the market.”

Moveo performed qualitative interviews, speaking with executives in decision-making roles, both at companies that have done business with Hallstar and potential customers.

Additionally, Moveo emailed a quantitative survey to people, Wennerstrom said, and got hundreds of responses.

“They took all that information. They did a competitive audit, and then they really put together a nice report, a very comprehensive report of Hallstar,” she said.

From the information gathered, Wennerstrom said Hallstar developed value propositions and then pressure-tested them both internally and externally. Once Hallstar figured out what it wanted, the creative development phase began.

It was an extensive and a surgical approach to “developing what we feel is a lasting platform where we can grow. It's scalable for future acquisitions or future business developments that we undertake. We thought the timing was right with where we are as a company and where we see our markets going,” she said.

Beyond the website and branding, Hallstar also released its new tagline: Let's Work Wonders.

“We like it because it works both for us internally and externally,” Wennerstrom said. “We're encouraging people here to use it just in their everyday jobs.”

While it works internally, she added that this is really a call to action for Hallstar's customers as well.

It's not just saying Hallstar can work wonders, but collectively, Hallstar and its customers can work wonders together.

“I think that "Let's' is a really key message for us because a big part of our value proposition and what we think we bring to customers that's unique is collaboration and hands-on responsiveness,” she said.

During its quantitative and qualitative research, Hallstar found that companies want to work with other companies that are responsive, willing to customize and other unique ways to solve problems and challenges that customers are facing.

“The tagline, we've had really good response to it so far,” she said, adding that it's both an energetic and energizing tagline.

The firm also spruced up its logo for the rebranding.

“We did look at our previous logo, and we did think it was time to get a bit more modern,” Wennerstrom said.

Hallstar took queues from the old logo and kept some elements it liked, such as the blue color and the star. The firm did lighten the blue color a bit for the new logo. While the previous logo was a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, it is now all caps. The company also changed the font and moved the star from the left to the right side of the logo.

Hallstar moved the star from its former position, Wennerstrom said, which “signifies is our progression. ... That's our star that's pointing to the future.”

Before launching the new branding externally, Hallstar felt strongly it needed to launch the campaign internally first, Wennerstrom said.

Hallstar's team is a tight-knit, collaborative group, she said, and the company wanted to ensure the team understood the tagline, the new creative and the logo, because it is about the company as a whole, including its employees.

The internal launch started in late February, she said, and wrapped up in July.

CEO John Paro and Wennerstrom went on the road to meet with Hallstar employees at different locations in a town hall format to summarize the discovery work and new branding program.

For a video about Hallstar's new branding, visit www.rubbernews.com/HallstarBranding.