HSN has come a long way since the early days of home shopping and HSN.com, and the HSN marketing team wants to make sure women know it. With a complete rebranding, HSN will be positioned as the hero to women who think the brand is outdated. The HSN rebranding makes a specific effort to attract younger women through the use of updated packaging, taglines, fonts, television scripts, and more.
The new tagline simply states, “It’s fun here.” The marketing push focuses on building customer trust in the brand through mobile and digital where nearly half of HSN’s sales and new customers come from.
Rebranding HSN is a good move (albeit a bit late), and should help to position the brand for the evolving television commerce industry. With the growth in multiple display use and original programming online, the convergence of television, mobile, and commerce is poised to catalyze this type of shopping in new ways. Gone are the days of the HSN and television commerce of ten or twenty years ago. This type of shopping will look very different in just a few years.
Natalie Zmuda of Ad Age reports that HSN hopes to remove its reliance on celebrities selling their products to define its own brand. Instead, the rebranding will allow HSN to stand on its own as a relevant brand. Already, HSN is leveraging social media to support its rebranding strategy with Google+ Hangouts that don’t necessarily rely on celebrities.
Anytime a brand controls its own success rather than relying on third parties (including celebrities) is a smart move. If HSN continues to move in the right direction, it might start to carve out a larger market share against its top competitor, QVC, and it might be able to lead the next phase of the television commerce industry as online and what we’ve known as traditional television become more and more integrated in the coming years.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts on the HSN rebranding as well as the future of television commerce overall.
Image: Philippe Ramakers
Susan Gunelius is the author of 10 marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and technology books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, an award-wining blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more.
She has over 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include large and small companies around the world and household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more. Susan is frequently interviewed about marketing and branding by television, radio, print, and online media organizations, and she speaks about these topics at events around the world. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.
