Rebranding Driftscape
Helping a Tourism SaaS company grow into its own story
I led a strategic rebrand that clarified Driftscape’s category, sharpened its buyer story, and turned a broad set of tourism features into a simpler platform narrative built for growth.
Driftscape rebrand 2025
Overview
Driftscape had outgrown its original elevator pitch.
The company started as a mobile app for discovering places. Over time, it became something much broader: a platform tourism teams could use to build self-guided tours, interactive maps, local business directories, rewards programs, coupons, scavenger
hunts, web guides, and AI-assisted listings.
That created a good problem.
The product had more to offer, but the story was harder to explain.
My job was to help sharpen the brand around what buyers actually needed to understand: who Driftscape helped, what problems it solved, and why it mattered beyond “having an app.”
The challenge
Driftscape had a lot of useful pieces.
Tours. Maps. Rewards. Coupons. Listings. Games. Analytics. Web experiences. AI-assisted content.
On their own, each feature made sense. Together, they needed a stronger organizing idea.
The brand had to explain the platform quickly to buyers who were busy, practical, and often juggling competing priorities: visitor engagement, stakeholder reporting, local business support, content management, funding, campaigns, and economic impact.
A long feature list was not going to do that job.
OTPP Brand Guidelines
The shift
The clearest opportunity was to move the story closer to the buyer’s world.
Before, Driftscape could be understood as:
A mobile app for discovering places
The stronger story became:
A visitor experience platform that helps tourism teams guide people to local places, stories, businesses, and experiences
That shift gave the brand more room to talk about business value.
It also made the product easier to connect to everyday tourism goals: helping visitors explore more, supporting local businesses, reducing admin work, and giving teams something measurable to report back.
Corporate Brand PPT Template
OTPP Website Landing Page
What I worked on
I helped build the rebrand from the inside out which included:
Positioning
Clarifying how Driftscape should be understood in the market.
Messaging
Turning product capabilities into buyer-friendly language.
Website structure
Creating a cleaner path from “what is this?” to “this could help my team.”
Feature storytelling
Grouping features around outcomes instead of treating everything as a separate product island.
Audience messaging
Adapting the story for tourism teams, BIAs, museums, municipalities, and regional organizations.
SEO content direction
Connecting brand language with the terms buyers were already searching for.
Creative direction
Balancing the warmth of local discovery with the credibility expected from a SaaS platform.
Brand Design System
Created a flexible brand system to make Driftscape more recognizable, consistent, and scalable across every customer touchpoint.
Audience strategy
Driftscape speaks to several buyer groups, so the messaging system needed range.
Tourism teams needed to hear about visitor engagement, destination storytelling, exploration,
and dispersal.
BIAs and local business districts needed a stronger link to foot traffic, coupons, rewards, local business visibility, and campaign participation.
Museums and cultural organizations needed to see the platform as a tool for interpretation, access, and self-guided storytelling.
Municipalities and regional teams needed to understand scalability, ease of management, and the value of launching digital experiences without custom development.
The goal was to give each audience a clear doorway into the same platform story.
Leading OTPP Creative Teams Brand Development
Creative direction
The brand needed to keep the feeling of travel and discovery without drifting into postcard-land.
Tourism has texture. Local streets, small businesses, public art, trails, heritage signs, food stops, odd little landmarks. The brand needed room for that warmth.
But Driftscape also sells to professional teams. Those buyers need clarity, structure, proof, and confidence.
So the creative direction aimed for a useful balance: friendly enough for tourism, clear enough for procurement, and flexible enough for campaigns, feature pages, webinars, emails, and sales decks.
Website Direction
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Feature pages became more outcome-led.
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Case studies were reframed around measurable tourism activity.
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Campaign language became punchier and more practical.
The site started to feel less like a product catalogue and more like a sales conversation with better manners.
Content and SEO
We rebuilt the entire SEO / AEO strategy from the ground up as buyers were not always looking for “Driftscape.”
They were looking for things like self-guided tour apps, digital tourism platforms, visitor engagement tools, local business directories, rewards programs, scavenger hunts, and tourism apps.
The content strategy connected those searches to Driftscape’s actual product strengths.
Results
42%-86%
Canadian Search Visibility
Near-zero → 6%
U.S.A. Search Visbility
75.6%
of attributed demos came from digital channels I lead: web, ads, and Free Trials
What changed
Before the rebrand, Driftscape had strong product depth but too many disconnected ways of explaining it.
After the rebrand, the story became easier to grasp:
Driftscape helps tourism teams guide visitors to local places, experiences, businesses, and stories, with tools that are easy to manage and easier to measure.
That gave the company a cleaner foundation for its website, campaigns, content, sales conversations, and future product launches.
Closing thought
The most valuable part of the work was the sorting.
Driftscape already had the pieces: useful features, good customer stories, a real market need, and a product with range.
The rebrand gave those pieces a clearer shape:
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A sharper category.
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A simpler story.
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A stronger link between tourism activity and business value.
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A brand system the team could actually use.
Help visitors explore more.
Help local places get discovered.
Help tourism teams show what worked.
Tony is an empathetic, strategic creative leader and an incredible mentor. He generously shares his knowledge, offers thoughtful guidance, and creates the kind of support that helps people do their best work.
Laura Gotkin, Senior UX Designer