The Challenge: Fragmented Brand Experience Across Touchpoints
At Bo, a digital banking initiative within NatWest Group, we encountered a significant challenge that is common in rapidly scaling digital businesses—brand and product design were operating in silos, leading to fragmented and inconsistent customer experiences across touchpoints. While the brand and marketing teams were focused on driving awareness and acquisition, the product design team was working on delivering seamless in-app banking experiences. However, the two efforts weren’t always connected.
This disconnection became particularly visible as the marketing team frequently introduced new illustration styles, iconography, and campaign-specific design elements across our website, landing pages, social channels, and paid media—often without consultation with the product design team. As a result, users would encounter a vibrant, playful, and heavily illustrated world in Bo’s marketing touchpoints, only to transition into an app that felt more stripped back, transactional, and utilitarian.
This lack of cohesion didn’t just undermine the user experience; it also created internal inefficiencies, confusion over ownership of design standards, and frustration between teams. Customers moving from acquisition journeys into the product felt the experience was jarring, which ultimately eroded trust and diluted Bo’s distinctive brand promise.
The Approach: Building Collaboration and a Shared Brand-System Mindset
Recognising the risks, I led an initiative to bridge the gap between marketing, brand, and product design by introducing more structured collaboration, shared ownership, and a unified brand expression framework.
We started by initiating a series of cross-functional workshops and regular alignment meetings, bringing together leads from marketing, brand, product design, and engineering. These sessions allowed us to map out the current customer journey, identify visual and tonal inconsistencies, and discuss the pain points experienced by each team.
A critical breakthrough came when we co-created an expanded, shared design system that not only covered product UI components but also incorporated marketing assets, illustration styles, typography systems, and brand expression rules. This ensured that new campaign visuals, iconography, or illustration styles introduced by marketing were now developed collaboratively with product designers, ensuring consistency across Bo’s digital ecosystem.
We established clear governance, where certain core design elements—such as colour palettes, typefaces, iconography, and tone of voice—were locked and codified across both marketing and product, ensuring a consistent baseline. However, we also left room for evolution by introducing flexible components and campaign overlays that could live within campaigns or landing pages but still adhered to the overarching design principles.
The Implementation: Embedding Brand Governance into the Design Workflow
To embed this alignment sustainably, we integrated shared tools and workflows, such as joint Figma libraries where both marketing and product designers contributed assets. We also introduced review rituals, where any new marketing campaign or visual identity change was reviewed not only by marketing stakeholders but also by product designers and engineers, ensuring that the customer journey remained seamless from ad click to app login.
Moreover, we worked closely with engineering to ensure the design system had a code counterpart, so that once aligned assets and components were approved, they could be rapidly implemented across both marketing websites and the consumer-facing app. This dramatically improved efficiency and reduced rework.
The Impact: A Cohesive Brand Experience and More Empowered Teams
This cross-team collaboration resulted in a more unified, consistent, and trust-building brand experience across Bo’s ecosystem. Customers now experienced a seamless narrative, where the tone, visuals, and emotional cues they encountered in marketing were mirrored within the app—strengthening Bo’s position as a friendly, modern, and supportive banking experience.
Internally, the initiative had an equally profound impact. Marketing, brand, and product teams reported feeling more connected and collaborative, with fewer tensions over asset ownership or design decisions. The product design team also found their work more impactful, as they could now extend the brand narrative into meaningful product moments, such as onboarding flows, empty states, and error messages—ensuring that Bo’s human, supportive brand voice showed up at every key interaction.
Ultimately, this work reinforced a critical principle: brand is not just what you say in your marketing—it’s what your users experience every day in your product. By aligning the two, we not only improved user trust and engagement but also empowered our teams to work more efficiently and creatively within a shared system.