Reinvigorating a Time-honored Brand: Pratt & Whitney

An empowering new positioning for an aerospace giant.

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Reinvigorating a Time-honored Brand: Pratt & Whitney

Founded in Hartford, Connecticut in 1925 by Frederick Rentschler, Pratt & Whitney is a leader in aerospace design and manufacturing. It is one of four United Technologies Corporation subsidiaries.

Pratt & Whitney’s first aircraft engine, the 410-horsepower Wasp, transformed the aviation industry. Today, with new passenger aircraft engines like the PurePower® PW1000G, the company continues to lead change. Pratt & Whitney also manufactures gas turbines for industrial applications and power generation.

Pratt & Whitney has approximately 33,500 employees who support more than 11,000 customers in 180 counties around the world.

Opportunity

For over 90 years, Pratt & Whitney has helped shape aerospace history as a leader and innovator. But their web presence fell short of reflecting their true stature and reputation in the industry. On the digital front, Pratt & Whitney needed to catch up to their competitors, who had more sophisticated websites.

Solution

With experience building responsive websites and a deep knowledge of strategic branding, messaging, and design, ThoughtForm was able to redesign Pratt & Whitney’s website to make it a natural extension of their brand—presenting Pratt & Whitney as the industry leader they are.

Our Approach

Analyzed the current and desired states for Pratt & Whitney’s website, then blazed a trail to get there.

The natural starting point for the project was to audit Pratt & Whitney’s current site. Digging into features like content structure and navigation revealed a list of areas that needed the most attention. ThoughtForm then confirmed that our priorities were aligned with Pratt & Whitney’s so we could hit the ground running.

Streamlined the site’s architecture and design to reflect Pratt & Whitney’s reputation for excellence.

Once the site’s architecture was re-defined, ThoughtForm focused on its visual design. The new Pratt & Whitney website needed to be contemporary, clean, and bold, with a refined color palette. It also needed to have a responsive design, functioning equally well on desktop and mobile devices.

Collaborated with Pratt & Whitney to bring the website from vision to reality.

To facilitate reviews, ThoughtForm used an agile design process, developing the site in a series of sprints. For each sprint review, ThoughtForm created a private staging site so that Pratt & Whitney team members could provide feedback on the design’s functionality and appearance.

Thoughtform truly listened to us in order to understand every facet of our business, then managed to translate what they heard into a sleek, modern website that represents who Pratt & Whitney really is.

Rob McGuinness, Digital Communications Manager, Pratt & Whitney