Hardinge Refreshing Its Marketing To Better Serve Manufacturing Customers

Hardinge is the leading international manufacturing provider of advanced metal-cutting solutions. The company provides a full spectrum of highly reliable CNC turning, milling, and grinding machines, as well as technologically advanced workholding and machine tool accessories. Its global footprint spans 65 countries and 6 continents and works in the aerospace/defense, automotive, medical, and mold & die industries.

As part of a new corporate communications program, Hardinge wanted to develop a consistent corporate message and increase visibility for the company with a public relations program. With rapid growth and a series of acquisitions, Hardinge’s message was inconsistent across more than 25 different websites operating as standalone entities across a number of regions across the world. Hardinge wanted to unite the brands into one global website with a clear and succinct message and provide one global brand identity. A key goal was to centralize its various sites, improve key customer touchpoints, and make it easier for customers to do business with them.

Hardinge selected us to spearhead the complex, global website project with new messaging, new content and an ongoing public relations program. Messaging – we developed a Messaging Blueprint which included a competitive analysis, persona development, and corporate and product line messaging. Using our proprietary Messaging Blueprint process, we helped Hardinge to understand how their competition was communicating as well as identify what motivates their prospects and customers by defining their pain points. We then developed value propositions that will inspire them to act. The resulting roadmap of top-level company, market and product messages is used as a foundation for the website redesign, public relations program and blogging program. It helps Hardinge speak with a clear and consistent voice in every inbound and outbound marketing activity. New Global Website – we partnered with 3 Media Web to design, build, deploy, and support the new website. This project was a big one, consolidating 25 disparate web properties around the world into one global sales-ready website that would unite all the Hardinge brands. 3 Media Web inventoried all of the Hardinge company websites to create a master template to ensure that the required functionalities for all brands were included in the new website. The master template features “modules” with specifications for images, text, page bands, sliders, testimonials – everything needed to design a page. we worked to refine the navigation to be more aligned with its personas, was involved in project and client management, and created new website content across the new site. MotionPoint was brought in to translate, deploy and operate the Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese and Korean versions of the site. Hardinge launched its website in eight languages using MotionPoint’s solution. These multilingual sites will help the company to provide consistent, online brand experiences and better serve its global customer base.