Good Silos. Great Brands.
Break the Walls, Keep the Wins
Most "brand problems" are alignment problems in disguise.
In most financial institutions, silos aren't the problem (the walls are).
Good things happen in silos because they create focus, speed, and ownership. Teams that own their domain can move fast and build expertise. The trouble starts when those silos stop talking to each other, and that's when the customer gets a fragmented experience and you lose momentum.
When marketing, product, and CX aren't aligned, customers notice. They get mixed messages, disconnected journeys, and inconsistent value. The customer doesn't care about your org chart. They care about whether their experience makes sense.
I've watched this play out dozens of times. A client will come to me convinced they have a "brand awareness problem" or a "customer acquisition problem." Sometimes they do. More often, they have an alignment problem wearing a brand problem's clothes.
One client, a regional bank with six high-performing teams, was convinced their growth issue was brand awareness. It wasn't.
Every team was running hard toward a different metric. Cards optimized for spend while deposits chased acquisition and CX measured satisfaction. They were all moving fast, but none of them were in sync.
Think about what that looks like from the customer's side. The cards team sends an offer for a premium card, the deposits team sends a separate campaign about savings rates, and CX follows up asking about satisfaction from a branch visit. That's three touchpoints, three different relationships, and zero coherence.
The fix wasn't a rebrand or a new campaign. We built a shared "Growth Dashboard" that tracked one thing: customer momentum across touchpoints. Not individual metrics in isolation, but how customers were actually progressing through their relationship with the bank.
Each silo kept doing its job. Cards still optimized for spend, deposits still chased growth, and CX still measured satisfaction. But now they worked in the same direction because they could see how their work connected to the customer's actual journey, not just their slice of it.
Results: deposits up 12%, fewer campaign conflicts, and faster decisions. The teams were just as fast individually, but collectively they stopped tripping over each other.
The interesting thing is what didn't change. Nobody lost their silo and nobody gave up ownership. The walls came down, but the specialization remained. That's the difference between alignment and homogeneity. Alignment means working toward the same outcome, while homogeneity means everyone doing the same thing. One builds momentum and the other kills expertise.
Most "brand problems" are alignment problems. When customers describe your brand as "confusing" or "inconsistent," they're usually not critiquing your logo or your tagline. They're describing their experience of your organization's misalignment. They just don't have the language to say it that way.
Here's a quick test. Ask three team leaders: "What are we solving for this quarter?" If you get three different answers, you don't have a strategy problem. You have an alignment problem. The strategy might be clear at the top, but it's just not connected to what teams are actually doing.
There's a simple exercise that surfaces this. I call it a "Silo Sync," and it takes about 30 minutes. Each team brings one slide answering three questions:
That's it. You don't need an elaborate offsite or a consultant-led workshop. Just 30 minutes of forced visibility. You'll be surprised how often teams don't know what each other is working on, and even more surprised at how many obvious handoff problems surface in a single meeting.
The dependencies question is the most revealing. Teams often don't realize they're waiting on each other, or they've built workarounds that create friction downstream. Once those dependencies are visible, solutions usually follow quickly. People are smart. They just need the information.
The third question is the hardest. "One way we could create a smoother customer journey together" forces teams to think beyond their metrics. It asks them to consider what the customer actually experiences, not just what they measure. That shift in perspective is where alignment starts.
Good silos build capability. Great brands build connection.
The capability comes from focus and deep expertise in cards, in deposits, in CX. That specialization is valuable. But the connection comes from alignment, from teams that understand how their work fits together and from an organization that designs for the customer's experience, not just internal ownership.
You don't have to choose between the two. The best FIs have both. They have strong silos with high walls of expertise and low walls of communication. The experts stay expert, but the information flows.
If your customer experience feels fragmented, don't start with the brand. Start with the walls.
Want to talk through it?
If this resonates and you're wondering how to apply it in your org, let's talk…you can grab some time here.
—Allison