The brief
Cultivating a stand-out brand
Hedges Direct are a specialist online supplier of hedging and structural plants. If buying plants online seems daunting, you need to talk to their down-to-earth colleagues. A team that’s grown from passion for greenery, and bring together loads of plant knowledge. Their mission? To help people choose between hawthorns and hornbeams – to make hedges easy.
None of this was being communicated though. Hedges Direct needed a brand to cut through a sea of sameness and showcase its friendly culture, simplified process and reassuring faces.
Services
Our Approach
Using our tools
Our Behavioural Science Toolkit identified the barriers to purchasing a plant online all related to feelings of uncertainty. From worrying about choosing the right plant to damage in transit, it’s easy to understand the factors standing in the way of customer happiness. To overcome this, the Hedges Direct brand needed to put the customer back in control… The answer? To address these key barriers head-on with a new brand design built on Hedges Direct’s key proposition of “Hedges made easy”.
We got to work, bringing the proposition to life with the slogan “We’ve got it”. This positively represents the Hedges Direct team as the trusted experts in their field. But crucially, it connects with customers on an emotional and practical level – communicating to them that they will be guided, reassured and supported all the way.
From a visual perspective our brand CACHE tool quickly identified an opportunity for the new brand to standout. In a category dominated by green brands that sound the same, a bold and brave brand bringing Hedges Directs personality and purpose to life could be truly distinctive.
With this in mind, we developed a suite of new brand assets including a logo, colour palette, photography style and tone of voice that would stand apart from the traditional, old-fashioned competitors.
The new abstract and playful logo was designed to be distinctive and communicate the enthusiasm, joy and simplicity that makes shopping with Hedges Direct so easy.
The colour palette pays homage to nature, with blue deliberately chosen as the primary brand colour to differentiate Hedges Direct from the sea of green dominating the commercial landscape.
The new graphic language uses organic and energetic shapes to further communicate simplicity and fun whilst maintaining a connection to the world of gardening. And finally, we developed a new tone of voice that is down-to-earth, enthusiastic and empathic.
Guidelines
New brand guidelines and tone of voice playbook mean that whichever channel is used to communicate, Hedges Direct consistently find the right way to communicate its new proposition.
The final element we identified as missing from the category was emotion. To make a stronger connection with the audiences we put the people of Hedges Direct at the heart of everything. We used real team members in the new photography and called the team ‘The Hedgers’ to emphasise the passion and expertise they have.
The results
Please check back soon for the results in numbers as the new website only went live in April 2023 and the launch campaign to drive engagement is set to start in August.
“We’ve loved working with the team at The Behaviours Agency. Our brief needed to be delivered with a super quick turnaround and they absolutely delivered! The end result has been a well thought through distinctive new brand which puts our people, at Hedges Direct, to the forefront of the brand. The team’s creativity and behavioural approach has really resonated with how we want to work as a business, and we’re excited to see how the brand launch delivers.’’
Lucy Dobson, Head of Marketing
