Autopay EN - profeina

Case study - B2B communication

challenge: communicating the rebranding of Blue Media to Autopay as a strategic change, rather than just a name change

insight: rebranding interests the media and the market only when it tells a story of ambition, scale, and real business change

PR activities: strong involvement of the founder and CEO in media relations

results: over 1,000 publications, 11.3 million reach and firmly establishing Autopay as a recognizable fintech brand; PR Wings 2024 winner in the B2B communication category

How to plan and conduct the rebranding process of the largest fintech brand in Central Europe?

How does the rebranding process work for a company that has previously focused its communication primarily on business, prioritizing product quality and messaging over brand identity? How do you overcome the fact that rebranding is usually a topic of little interest to the media and entities outside the industry? We explain how we supported the rebranding of Autopay, one of the largest companies in the fintech sector.

For years, Blue Media evolved as a “leader of background payments” – focusing on product quality and recognition. Payment services reached customers through partners (B2B2C), while the Autopay application for highway tolls reached customers directly (B2C). Although both brands spanned a significant reach—50,000 companies in Poland and 10 million monthly users, respectively—they were essentially unrecognizable.

In 2023, Blue Media decided to merge two companies into a single brand.

The goal of Blue Media’s rebranding to Autopay was:

Autopay wanted the new image to combine Blue Media’s many years of experience as a proven business partner with the company’s new direction of development and the startup energy that has characterized the team for years.

Background

Autopay was and remains a pioneer of many services at the intersection of technology and finance. More than 10 million people use the company’s solutions every month – paying for online shopping, settling bills online, topping up phones online, authorizing payments via SMS, and – when using the Autopay app – paying automatically for motorways in Poland or purchasing electronic vignettes for neighboring countries.

In line with the adopted direction of development, the mission of the new Autopay brand is to provide an exceptional payment experience – finding a new level of convenience, intuitiveness, and automation. “We want to remove all barriers that we may encounter when making payments,” emphasized Andrzej Antoń, CEO and co-founder of Autopay, in interviews.

It was left to us only to communicate this gracefully.

Planning the rebranding process

In the case of Autopay, in addition to a team of several people within the company itself, three agencies were directly involved in the project: Brand New Attitude (BNA) – responsible for branding, 2012 Agency – for creative, and the PR agency Profeina – responsible for the new communication strategy.

In the first step, it was essential to establish the scope of the changes and develop them in depth. Then, to implement them in a way that would not disrupt the company’s business continuity and allow for a smooth transition from the “old” to the “new”. And finally – to effectively communicate the changes to the audience – both internal (employees) and external (customers, users, partners, the market).

The entire rebranding process was planned in several stages to gradually accustom business partners and end customers to the changes. The rebranding process was spread over many months – from April to December 2023.

Profeina była odpowiedzialna za nową strategię komunikacji.

It is worth noting that the Autopay team and all agencies cooperated closely throughout the entire process. The results of one’s work served as guidelines for others. Additionally, the Autopay team involved in the rebranding process organized joint workshops for representatives of all agencies to facilitate understanding of the direction of changes and to jointly refine the new messaging.

The main tasks of Profeina, carried out in cooperation with the Autopay PR team, can be grouped into several areas:

Parallel to the implementation of the individual stages of the rebranding process, Profeina continuously conducted regular corporate and product PR activities for Autopay.

PR Activities

Regardless of the level of refinement and detail of the prepared scenario for the rebranding process, there is always a risk of unforeseen situations. There were a few challenges here as well.

To accustom the media to the new subject matter the client wanted to address, we prepared a strategic document that introduced new key messages and themes worth exploring in the media:

In the course of operational work, we ensured that the new messages were appropriately highlighted:

we arranged three interviews with Andrzej Antoń, CEO of Autopay, in which the new themes were addressed;
we developed advertorials in five press titles and industry portals read by a broad business environment,
we supported the brand's presence at industry events (European Financial Congress, European Forum for New Ideas, Consumer Finance Congress) to maximize exposure for the new brand and its experts,
we co-created the framework for a new social campaign conducted by Autopay, in collaboration with SWPS University and the Zwolnieni z Teorii Foundation, regarding algorithmic exclusion.