There’s little that generates such a blast of brainstorming activity and just plain hard work as the introduction of a new brand. Which is what happened during February and March of this year, when the HUGHES® marcom team collaborated with GlobalWorks Group, a New York-based branding and advertising agency, to develop a new branding system that simplifies and unifies its company name and service offerings. And a veritable army of Hughes employees worked to incorporate the new brand into every aspect of the business.
The New Hughes
The company selected the Hughes brand to proudly claim its heritage, as Hughes Network Systems, whose employees invented VSATs over 20 years ago and whose innovations and solutions empower customers to realize the full power of broadband technologies. Explaining the new tagline, ”Connect to the Future,” Pradman Kaul put it this way, ”Clearly everything we do is all about the future—and about connecting our customers to the future of broadband today.”
HughesNet is Born
With the Hughes brand decided, the time was also right to brand the company’s rapidly expanding portfolio of services and solutions, addressing the varied and growing requirements of all its customer segments, whether enterprise, government, small business, or consumer. As a result, HughesNet® was born—a complete portfolio of broadband services designed to add signifi cant value beyond basic transport services.
“HughesNet replaces the DIRECWAY brand, which had become synonymous with 'broadband by satellite transport' and goes beyond transport alone to encompass an ever expanding range of solutions and services for all our customer segments,” said Arunas Slekys, vice president of corporate marketing. “For enterprise and government, HughesNet delivers managed network services across multiple transport platforms, along with a full range of network, program, and account management, freeing customers to run their own businesses while we run their networks. For consumers and small businesses, HughesNet delivers high-speed, affordable Internet access and comes under various plans designed to meet all budgets, from single home sites to multi-branch small business networks.”
To illustrate the breadth and power of HughesNet services, the company adopted a new logo and tagline. The logo sports a three-dimensional symbol on the top right, evoking a dynamic forward motion, while the squares suggest data transmission by satellite, digital content, and networks coming together. The tagline, “Broadband Unbound,” goes beyond connectivity to represent solutions, services, and applications, illustrating that anything that is Hughes is broadband.
“We arrived at the HughesNet name because it refl ects the incredible value built into the Hughes corporate name,” said Yuri Radzievksy, chairman and CEO of GlobalWorks Group. “We recognized that combining Hughes and Net offered a perfect balance, linking the services name inextricably with Hughes, the corporate brand. And Net is understood worldwide to mean connectivity and networking, which represents the oxygen of today’s industrial progress.”
Business as Usual
A branding project of this magnitude does not happen by chance. Teamwork and processes played a large part in the success of the project. “The re-branding initiative touched everyone in the company,” said Hossein Memarsadeghi, a member of the product launch/business management group who led the branding team. “Everyone needed to play a part—from the people managing our end customers, to product development, marketing communications, Website design, technical documentation, human resources, legal, and facilities. Exceptional teamwork enabled us to pull off the branding initiative without missing a beat. And by linking the branding process tightly with our product and service delivery model, we were able to roll out the branding project into our day-to-day activities with minimal disruption. Our best measure of success was that when we cut-over on March 27, it was business as usual.” |