How and why we rebranded to Ortto

Today we rebrand Autopilot to Ortto.

A brand is so much more than a name and a logo. It’s your company, the product, its vision, and how it presents itself to the world. In a nutshell, if a company was a person what would it be called, look like, act like, sound like? When executed well, a good brand strategy unifies the entire organization forming a bedrock upon which the company can stand. So it makes sense that as a business grows and scales, its brand needs to evolve with it. 

It’s been quite a journey since Co-Founders Mike and Chris Sharkey launched Autopilot in 2015.  The first visual customer journey builder in the market, it was amazing and widely adopted as an easy-to-use marketing automation solution. But we have come a long way since then, our product has completely evolved. 

This created a problem. When people heard our name, they thought of stand-alone marketing automation. We were also looking a bit tired and we weren’t presenting ourselves quite in the way we wanted to. Autopilot was and still is ambitious, secure, smart, insightful, and remarkable—but our name and visual identity didn’t reflect this.

It was time to go back to the drawing board. We needed a new name and a fresh, new look. We gathered together the team, jumped into a bunch of workshops, and asked ourselves some tough questions. 

We took it back to foundations.

Our why

Why is it we do what we do?

Most great companies were founded by a person or group of people who experienced a problem, couldn’t find a solution, and went on to create one. 

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a seismic shift towards customer interactions being digital-first. Businesses who sell online, consistently see a number of key issues:

• Customers expect remarkable and relevant experiences from brands online. If they don’t get this, they are happy to switch.

• Unifying the customer profile is hard. Brands struggle to unify their data from across all departments in the organization. Data is often siloed in teams or inaccessible. 

• Marketers want to use this rich data to understand and create relevant and timely interactions for their customers based on events and actions.

• CRMs don’t understand event-based data. The object model is outdated.

• Brands struggle to understand their customer journey analytics including attribution or tying their actions back to key business metrics. 

• Brands don’t have the human or financial resources to implement complex platforms and architecture.

• The online landscape is competitive how can brands build efficiencies and predict what actions will drive the most revenue or growth.

These issues were ones we had faced ourselves as a SaaS business. This shift has created a huge need for a solution that helps brands unify and understand their customer data across the organization, operationalize this data to deliver personalized customer journeys at scale, and holistically understand their customer journey analytics. If AI could be used to predict which content or actions would lead to success then 🤯.

So we built it.

A unified customer journey platform for online business.

We now exist to empower businesses to grow. We enable brands to understand and make meaningful connections with their audiences at every step of the customer journey—creating easier, clearer, more rewarding experiences. It is our vision that through our seamless product experience, outstanding customer service, and remarkable innovation, we will become the leading customer journey platform for businesses that sell online.

What we value

Values are the uncompromising truths and guiding principles that define what your brand stands for. These values are the driving force behind the brand, business, behaviors, and decisions.

We value:

• Connection. Whether it’s us and our customers, or them and theirs, connection is integral to who we are. We might be a leader in innovative technology but, above all, we’re human.

• The uncomplicated. We simplify processes and unify data to make the challenging achievable and the complex easy to understand. Where possible, we automate. It’s our job to make your job as simple as possible.

• Integrity. It doesn’t matter how reliable our product is if our customers don’t trust us to deliver on what we say we will. We’re building a secure product, as well as building secure relationships with our customers, allowing them to do the same with theirs.

• 10x Better. As the world grows and evolves, so will our offering. When we find a great solution, we ask how it can be 10x better? We are always innovating, growing, and adapting — finding new ways to reduce complexity and help our customers grow their business.

Who are we?

If our company was a person what would it be like? Again, we thought about our team, our culture, what was so amazing about it. We found as a company we are several things:

• Ambitious. We are forward-thinking and ambitious, always eager to explore new ideas, learn new things — always striving to grow and improve. We think big so we can deliver big results.

• Secure. We are trustworthy, safe, and reliable. Our customers rely on us to not only deliver an exceptional product but to protect their data. We take that very seriously.

• Smart. From our product to our tech to the way we present ourselves, we are smart. We are highly intelligent but act with humility and have a skill for explaining complex things in a useful, simple way.

• Insightful. By being self-aware, open-minded, and always asking the right questions, we can gain a deep understanding of problems and provide insightful solutions.

• Remarkable. Our platform is remarkable. We want to give our customers remarkable experiences and want their customers to have a remarkable experience too. So we should always strive to be remarkable, in product, service, and performance.

Brand elements

We engaged leading brand agency Christopher Doyle & Co to work with us. Christopher immediately understood what we were trying to achieve with the rebrand and our vision for the future. He and his team have been true partners to us throughout the process, helping us to create an exciting new brand. 

A new name

Ortto is an evolution of our existing Autopilot brand name. We needed our new name to be clear and concise, but still, convey what we do. The word Ortto is a custom, succinct variation of the word auto, which means to operate independently and without needing help. It also speaks to automation. We know our customers want to be able to unify and operationalize their data — harnessing its power for automation — Ortto reflects this. 

Logo

Our logo is a custom wordmark with connection at the heart. The shapes as you see in the design system depict the various stages of the customer journey. The shapes convey the motion of a customer moving through the various stages and the different shapes highlight different experiences at each stage.

Design system

Our design system came from the customer journey and the path it creates. The customer journey has stages, which can vary depending on each business and customer. Our design system shows these stages, embodying the feeling of motion and allowing them to be created in almost an infinite number of ways. 

Colour palette

We wanted a palette that was vibrant and energetic, yet still felt professional. We also wanted to retain some of the blue from Autopilot as a nod to our past. 

Typography

Typography is an important part of conveying our personality. In a digital context, it's especially important to ensure usability. 

Voice and tone

When we write or speak on behalf of Ortto, it should feel simple, accessible, and confident — just like our offering. And whether it’s about the services our product provides, the solutions it gives our customers, or the ease of using it, the remarkable nature of what Ortto has to offer should be felt everywhere, including in the way we write.

Custom illustrations, iconography, and product visuals

Our in-product illustrations and iconography styles needed to be completely reworked to align with the new brand elements and personality. We worked with a custom illustrator and iconographer to ensure these were unique to our brand and conveyed the right feeling. 

Our marketing product visuals have also been updated and refined to hero-specific features and functionality in a simplified way whilst remaining authentic to the platform.

And here is how it all comes together…

The final word

We are beyond excited about this new chapter as Ortto — it’s only the beginning of what’s to come. A full rebrand like this is a huge challenge that touches on every team in the organization. A huge thank you to the Ortto team and to Christopher Doyle & Co for making this vision become a reality.