The Hardee’s Way brand book targeted employees at Hardee’s across America. It’s a primer on making food and serving the community the right way. After years of ads featuring scantily-clad women seductively eating burgers, Hardee’s wanted to make their great tasting food the focus. And stand apart from the rest of the category by showcasing their process for making better tasting food.

Hardee’s relaunched their brand to show fast food restaurants that they’ve always done things the right way. While competitors make things the easy way, Hardee’s prefers the Hardee’s Way. They cook burgers over fire, hand-bread chicken and bake biscuits from scratch every morning at 4AM. This brand book was created to define the Hardee’s Way of doing things for their employees. It‘s also designed to destroy a microwave, which Hardee’s doesn’t think is the right way to do anything.

It’s easy to go work at a Hardee’s competitor. We had to make the Hardee’s way of doing things (which is inherently harder) seem not only like it was the right way to make food, but also fun. We had a series of fun yet impossible games, a hard to navigate table of contents, fun mantras, pinky swears, a actual hand stitched page, as well as a page made of aluminum foil that was meant to destroy a microwave to discourage the easy way of doings thing.

The book gave Hardee’s employees a renewed sense of purpose. No longer did they feel like they were doing things the hard way, it was the right way, the Hardee’s way. In an industry where it’s difficult to hire and keep workers when someone else is out there always making it easier at the push of a button (looking at you, golden arches), now Hardee’s managers and employees had a way of operating to rally around. The Hardee’s gold star on their uniform became a badge of pride.