Modernising a 135-Year Defence Legacy

The Challenge

HII is a 135-year-old global defence contractor that builds the world’s most powerful ships and integrated defence solutions. Their brand had evolved piecemeal over decades, and the digital presence didn’t reflect the scale or sophistication of the organisation. Beyond the visual refresh, HII needed to understand and manage their public perception across social media at scale—monitoring hundreds of thousands of community interactions across sensitive defence and veteran-related conversations where misinformation and hostile narratives required rapid, informed response.

The Approach

The engagement spanned two parallel workstreams. On the brand side, we delivered a logo refresh with documented evolution, a complete website redesign, event collateral for major defence expos including Sea Air Space and Station Domination campaigns, employer branding systems, and merchandise programmes. On the intelligence side, we built a proprietary community management and social listening platform that uses AI-powered sentiment analysis to process comments at scale, flag risks, and generate contextually appropriate responses. The platform includes OSINT investigation capabilities, monthly trend analysis, and multi-language support to cover HII’s global community footprint.

The Results

The community intelligence platform now monitors over 20,000 pages and has analysed 468,687 comments across 66,486 posts—providing HII’s communications team with real-time sentiment data and risk flags. The redesigned website and brand system were rolled out across all divisions, creating a cohesive identity for the first time in the company’s modern history. Event presence at Sea Air Space generated measurable uplift in employer brand engagement, and the social listening system identified and neutralised multiple misinformation narratives before they gained traction.