The Opportunity

Advertising / Brand / Collateral / Website Content and Design

In 2013, North Star Marketing began working with the more than 130-year-old local manufacturer, Hope Global. The Hope Global management team presented us with a challenge—to help them refine their messaging and brand approach to reach their target audience.

We began with brand consulting, in which we surveyed over a dozen key Hope Global employees on areas like market opportunity, brand differentiation, vision, key messages and target audience.

What we learned is that Hope Global’s target audiences are mainly engineers who are making the purchasing decisions at their organization and should be the focus of their brand messaging and marketing materials. We also learned who these engineers choose to partner with really matters. It’s the engineer’s responsibility to select product and component providers, and the success of their partner choices reflects back on them. If they select the wrong vendor, that reflects poorly on them. If they choose the right vendor, they can look like a hero. So they not only need to choose providers that offer the best in quality and value, but also providers whose goal is to support the engineer as a partner that is invested in their success, not as just a vendor.

The Solution

A New Website That Speaks Volumes

North Star was excited to tackle the challenge of creating a new, fresh and modern online presence for Hope Global’s website. It was important to our client that the new site was a digital reflection of the promise they make to their customers every day, which is to provide creative engineered solutions through innovative materials and processes. 

With that in mind North Star took to the web to create a clean, bold, and modern design that employs the best UX practices and makes it easy for visitors to find the creative solutions they’ve come to expect from Hope Global. 

View Completed Site

Using our newfound information on the Hope Global target audience, we turned to our creative team to complete an informed imagination exercise which would explore the creative interpretation of the information gathered in our brand exercise. What came out of that exercise was the idea that both Hope Global and their target engineers are Creative Problem Solvers. That brand essence speaks to Hope Global’s history of innovation and reputation as a solutions-driven partner, and the persona of their target engineer, who also wants to be recognized for their creative approach.

With support of the Hope Global management team, we translated the Creative Problem Solver theme through a new redesigned website, an automotive manufacturing magazine ad, a series of collateral pieces and a video which are all helping Hope Global stand out in a crowded market place.

Tradeshow Banners

Capabilities Sell Sheets

Brand Standards & Tradeshow Banners

Print Brochure

Product Brochure

Print Advertising

Print Brochure

The Results


  • Increased differentiation in a crowded market
  • Fresh messaging and marketing pieces that Hope Global is proud of
  • Key management members in agreement on who Hope Global is and where they want to be

“It was difficult for us having been in business for so many years to think about speaking differently about who we are. However, we can’t grow if we aren’t open to change so the BRANDworks exercise allowed us to candidly talk about what made us unique, what our brand should be saying about us and where we want to be. That’s how we got to ‘Creative Problem Solvers,’ which I think really speaks to our relationships with our customers and our commitment to their success.”

Cheryl MerchantPresident & CEO