Panoramic Roof: Full Rebrand & Repositioning in One Month
Who and what is “Panoramic Roof”?
It’s a company that gives people a legal way to see Saint Petersburg from a panoramic rooftop viewpoint on the building that currently hosts Nevsky Centre (a large shopping mall on Nevsky Prospekt in Saint Petersburg). There used to be more rooftops available, yet after a few messy incidents access got shut down. The brand’s core rule is “do everything by the book”, so the number of rooftop programmes dropped sharply. To keep the experience alive, they added walking tours — and in practice they can be just as strong, because the guides carry a lot of the magic.
The request and the pain they came with.
They’d spoken with us before, so they weren’t coming “to try” — they came for a full rethink of positioning: “we’re doing more than rooftops now, we’re doing walking tours too.”
The problem is visible right in the name. The word “roof” is literally in it, and that quietly blocks access to the service for people who don’t care about rooftops. More precisely: it limits the move into a wider market. That had to be addressed.
We also had to rebuild the landing flow for the new positioning, invite people into a Telegram channel (Telegram is a messaging app), and think through what a potential subscriber should see there. Then, using ads, we had to bring both existing subscribers and new people into that Telegram channel.
Audit of every existing platform.
This is the first stage for any business, not just those coming for a rethink of brand strategy. On social platforms, the list of tours wasn’t updated, there was no “hello, this is who we are” post, and some stylistic choices lost their meaning once the business shifted towards a wider set of services.
We rewrote the pinned post using the Golden Circle logic, so people could grasp the business faster — values, intent, mission — without having to guess what they’re really buying into.
In this niche, automated booking is close to mandatory — it removes a pile of friction. So we also adjusted their chatbot flows:
How did customers come in before we started working together?
Originally, people came for a rooftop tour. Then, after meeting the guide, they’d join other walking programmes led by that same guide. Once we saw this, we decided to speed up “meeting the guide” — to make it happen before the tour. That meant writing descriptions for each guide, adding photos, and designing content that comes directly from them, so people can latch onto the way a guide thinks and speaks — and “taste” the personality in advance.
We moved the guides info into the first menu button in their VK community:
We created an intro article about the guides:
And a text written in their voice, using a format we prepared:
On an additional request, we helped design a management system so that new guides could join the operation smoothly, and when someone leaves, a part of the brand’s soul doesn’t vanish with them.
Here’s a quote from the brand strategy deck:
This is how we aim for service stability, and then use the guide-as-a-personality engine to spin up a conversion flywheel — where paid marketing and advertising gradually turn into stable sarafan (literally “sundress” in Russian; idiom for word-of-mouth referrals).
The main work: building new positioning and branding.
As in any serious project, we started with market analysis. Competitors weren’t limited to other rooftop tours. We also looked at classic city tours and art spaces that run events, because that’s a direction this business could grow into over time.
After analysing them, we made a handful of suggestions that could strengthen the brand: pick a mascot or a clear symbol, develop some unusual tours (they may sell less, yet they serve people who’ve been to the city before), and add gamification — a traveller’s card where guests get stamps for completed tours, similar to coffee shops: “Collect 6 stamps. The 7th is a gift.”
We also looked at the product through the 4C and 4P frameworks. We use them as a pair for a more complete view. Different angles often reveal things that were invisible before — or they simply formalise what already exists, so it can be managed.
Here’s a dry extract from 4P & 4C in the brand strategy:
We designed a new customer journey and planned how to influence it at each stage. Later, it changed: as the season started, the client’s need shifted. Instead of focusing on Telegram subscribers, they needed more direct leads. We adapted quickly, and we still try to anticipate the full range of needs in advance.
New identity: how do you shift the focus correctly?
At first there was the roof, and rooftop tours, and everything revolved around that. Saint Petersburg has plenty of similar offers, but this client stood out thanks to permits and safety. Then rooftops stopped being the sole focus. The solution turned out simple: use what already exists. “Panoramic Roof” — since “roof” is no longer the defining word, we keep the familiar “Panoramic”. It’s a flexible word that pairs well with many directions, which lets you create sub-brands without breaking recognition.
For example, walking tours can run under “Panoramic SPB” (SPB is a common shorthand for Saint Petersburg). As “Panoramic” builds a strong association with this business, it crystallises into the main brand signifier.
Over time, the umbrella brand can even adopt the name of the most successful sub-product, while keeping audience recognition. VK did this once. Mail.ru Group took the name of its strongest sub-brand and became the VK holding.
This way, the legal entity name in payments won’t raise questions, and the audience won’t lose track of the community. A gradual transition also helps the owner: step-by-step renaming spreads out the ongoing costs of hours and money needed for the repackaging.
Traffic
Before launch, we prepared the platforms for traffic: we built a fresh “tour invitation” bot in VK (major Russian social network) and mirrored it in Telegram.
The bot ended up being 38 steps long, same structure in Telegram:
The initial plan was to build the Telegram channel audience. Then the numbers made it obvious: with the content available at that moment, people subscribed less than expected. The VK group grew better. The best-performing creative was text + an 8-second video.
We also got 2 leads right away: one in VK, one in Telegram.
Why people didn’t subscribe to Telegram in the volume we wanted:
We tied the channel too tightly to tours. It needed something more “evergreen” and interesting — content that makes people want to subscribe and keep reading regularly.
Why it matters: engagement leads to sales. People can buy directly, and engaged readers also keep the channel warm for newcomers. The audience that buys quickly arrives earlier than the audience that reads for a while.
We described a full set of Telegram ideas that could increase retention and reading time. We didn’t implement them during our engagement — we worked together for just one month.
Traffic results: pros and cons
- Competitor audiences.
- Keywords: экскурсии по крышам спб, крыши экскурсии спб, экскурсии по крышам питер, крыши экскурсии питер, экскурсии по крышам петербург, крыши экскурсии петербург, экскурсии по крышам санкт-петербург, крыши экскурсии санкт-петербург (Russian keyword phrases meaning “roof tours in Saint Petersburg”).
- Parents: framed as “go somewhere as a family and introduce a ребёнок (literally “child” in Russian; a kid) to culture”.
- Interests and other segments.
Keywords gave the most workable result: clicks at ~RUB 60 compared to other audiences where a click cost over RUB 100, plus subscriptions. We kept the keyword set “экскурсии по крышам СПб” across Russia as the working creative direction.
Clicks: 167 at an average price of RUB 122
Messages: 10 at RUB 2,037.46 each
VK subscriptions: 31 at RUB 657.25 each
We weren’t happy with the traffic results. Lead cost — meaning a DM message from the ad account — was expensive. Subscriber cost also felt too high; we wanted to bring it down towards RUB 100.
We dug into the previous run — winter, “off-season”. Here’s what comparisons looked like:
We compared two periods in detail and found no fundamental difference in traffic performance.
And here’s a screenshot for the same budget in April 2024:
Why did it turn out this way?
We worked for a month in both cases. In a niche like this, that’s simply not enough time to rebuild the conversion funnel deeply enough to make leads cheaper.
Strictly speaking, paid traffic is not the primary lead gen channel here. Panoramic understands that well, which is why they’re present on aggregator platforms like Tripadvisor (global travel reviews and booking aggregator).
So in this niche, traffic management is a touchpoint system — one piece of a bigger set of work:
- Newsletter campaigns.
- Brand-name targeting (we didn’t get to test it).
- Group retargeting to stay top-of-mind (they had 4,000+ subscribers).
- Driving people from aggregators to owned platforms, where Yandex Metrica (Russian web analytics, similar to Google Analytics) and VK Pixel (tracking pixel inside VK’s ad ecosystem) help chase audiences via retargeting.
- Retargeting based on positive actions, as a reminder (within VK Ads).
Why do we consider this case strong — and worth our portfolio?
How many teams can actually do this?
- Repackage a community for a new positioning under tight deadlines.
- Estimate LTV logic and propose a strategy for working with it (sales through guides).
- Measure the “experience value” for visitors and propose a strategy to improve the core product (guide motivation and building tours through guide personalities).
- Propose a positioning shift via a gradual sub-product step (focus on Panoramic and a transition to Panoramic SPB).
- Test paid traffic and map a more realistic system of touchpoints.
- Create a strategy presentation (parts of which are shown above) and record a video walkthrough that explains how to move through this development path.
Credits:
Bogdan Zozulya — strategist, marketer, lead: https://t.me/bo_martian
Anastasia Kiseleva — project manager until 9 May 2024: https://t.me/stacykiselyova
Polina Mladshikh — internet marketer: https://t.me/dokersha_traf
Lyubov Simanova — traffic manager until 19 August 2024: https://t.me/Smm_button
To order a service, message us via any of these links:
VK community: https://vk.me/bo_target
VK direct messages: https://vk.me/the_redbeard
Telegram direct messages: https://t.me/bo_martian
And do go on a tour with Panoramic: https://vk.com/panoramicroof