Sometimes Earlier Adopters Need
to Play Catch Up

ABB’s Industrial Solutions Group (formerly GE Industrial Solutions) prides itself on making life easier up and down customer supply chains – from creating superior product solutions to streamlining processes and clarifying communications. They embraced digital technology early on, creating a distributor portal as soon as technology allowed.

They named the U.S. version EliteNet, to highlight their relationship with distribution (Elite) and the value of what was, at the time, emerging technology (Net). The European version was called PowerShop, as it was primarily a product selection, specifying and ordering site.

CLIENT

ABB
Engineering & Manufacturing

WHAT WE DID
  • Identity & Branding
  • Video
  • Collateral

Projects

Rebranding the Portal

EliteNet and PowerShop were names that eventually suffered early-adopter blues. They focused on the technology (Net) and a limited functionality (Shop) – making the names woefully out of date after a decade of success. BlueStar did the customer research and capabilities audit to create a new brand for the portal: ABB Empower. The new portal Brand shouted the full suite of powerful capabilities and the ability to access product, ordering, pricing, invoicing and other information to do more, faster. It empowers customers to do better.

Showcasing Powerful
Time-Saving Technology

BlueStar created a video to help ABB entice, educate and encourage the adoption of a powerful time-saving tool within the Empower portal. PanelScan helps Electrical Distributors specify large, complex orders more quickly and with less chance of error. The PanelScan video is part sales tool and part tutorial. It combines animation and actual technology output to show an understanding of customer challenges and the power of PanelScan technology. With voiceovers in various languages, it is a truly global introduction to an efficiency and accuracy breakthrough available only when ordering ABB products.

The Results

The right brand is more than a name. It conveys a feeling customers can internalize and value.

Driving Distribution to ABB

A clear, concise, benefit-driven brand and communications platform is helping ABB strengthen its distributor relationships. We showed older customers that this new tech is real, simple and reliable. Younger customers saw that we continue to be early adopters with AI and other tech. These are just two examples of the scores of projects we’ve completed to help ABB and GE Industrial Solutions showcase product, service and industry leadership.