Olo
Empowering Restaurants: Redefining Digital Dining with Olo’s Brand Evolution
Olo, a leading restaurant SaaS platform under the leadership of Noah Glass has pioneered online ordering and payments, processing millions of orders daily through its on-demand commerce engine. The company provides restaurants with a single source to understand and serve every guest from every channel, whether direct or third-party. As Olo sought to expand its offering to provide “Hospitality at Scale” for all guests, it recognized the need for a distinctive and aspirational brand positioning. This positioning would guide the company in leveraging transaction data to help restaurants and hospitality brands provide more meaningful guest experiences.
Olo reached out to WANT Branding to develop a compelling strategic brand platform that would support the company’s business mission of enabling “Hospitality at Scale” and create a common understanding of the brand to guide the Olo brand in this new growth phase.
WANT Branding began by conducting an extensive review of ten competitive brands and facilitating internal management strategy sessions to learn deeply about the brand and the industry. This thorough process led to creating a new powerful brand positioning idea: “Accelerate The Future.”
The new brand positioning highlighted Olo’s role in bringing the future closer with ordering, payment, and engagement solutions that deliver more efficient operations and better profitability. It emphasized the positive effect of Olo’s solutions: more orders mean more payments, more payments mean more data, and more data drives more orders—accelerating business growth at scale.
WANT also developed a comprehensive brand manifesto to support both Olo’s business mission (“Hospitality at Scale”) and brand positioning (“Accelerate The Future”). This new narrative created clarity and alignment and helped to showcase Olo’s commitment to helping restaurants make every guest feel like a regular across their entire operation—seamlessly, automatically, and consistently.
WANT then crafted key messaging across three key solution propositions (Pay, Order, Manage) to ensure that Olo would be seen as an innovator working daily to create transformation in the restaurant industry. The messaging emphasized Olo’s ability to leverage data to create better guest experiences, drive sales, and help restaurants do more with less.
The new brand positioning and narrative provided Olo with a clear and compelling story not only to share with its various stakeholders but also with its employees. The brand effectively communicates Olo’s unique value proposition in the industry and its vision for the future of restaurant technology.
The “Accelerate The Future” positioning and “Hospitality at Scale” messaging have been seamlessly integrated into Olo’s communications. The new messaging was debuted in 2023 in Palm Springs at Olo’s Beyond4 customer conference to great acclaim. Since then, it has continued to guide Olo’s messaging, helping to unify the company’s message across different product offerings, differentiate Olo in a competitive market, attract new clients and talent, and reinforce Olo’s position as a leader in restaurant technology innovation.
