Itaú BrandSystem
Where 100,000 employees access the brand's assets.
Overview
Itaú Unibanco is Brazil's largest private bank and Latin America's biggest financial institution, considered the country's most valuable brand for the past 16 years, according to Interbrand. Even so, from newcomers to longtime employees, people struggled to find basic brand assets like logos, fonts, and icons, and often didn't know who to ask.
My Role
I worked as a part-time Product Designer, then later full-time, collaborating with a brand specialist, service designers, copywriters, the development team, and marketing directors as stakeholders.
The Challenge
There was no official repository for basic assets, just a scattering of brand books. Itaú has almost 90 years of brand history but no proper home for it. In 2019, with close to 100k employees, the time spent hunting for the right color or icon added up to real money lost. The goal was to protect Brazil's most valuable brand inside a single digital repository.
The Team
What started as a side project alongside the main digital initiatives, backed by user research and a product roadmap, grew into a full-time role working with Jonny Czar (product design specialist), Diego Strobelt (product designer), Christiane Lynn (brand specialist), and Bruna Daniele (service designer).
Main Tasks
- Discovering customer insights & ideation
- Building the project vision
- Planning and scope definition
- Design execution and validation
Discovering Customer Insights & Ideation
The first step was understanding, in depth, who these people were and what their pain points looked like. Since Itaú also works with outside companies, this exploration phase included external agencies and studios too. Four personas came out of it:
Newcomers: just starting at Itaú.
Spreaders: create, update, and spread assets.
Independent users: use material the spreaders created.
Delegators: don't use it directly, but share it onward.
The goal was to fit the proposal to each of these four personas, at their own moment in the journey. From there, we explored the available content with the branding team, ran card-sorting sessions to understand how people relate to each content type, and mapped the journey to know what to offer, and when.
MVP
What we learned about which content to prioritize took us from a sitemap to a designed MVP. It shipped with the essentials: logo, fonts, icons, basic colors, and a presentation template.
Results
We measured engagement, happiness, adoption, and success, quantitatively and qualitatively, over a month, using the HEART framework.
Next Steps
Evolve the MVP into a logged area with content organized by product, such as Itaú Varejo, Itaú Empresas, and Rede.
