Exclaimer Vancity customer story hero image

Brand kits before the rebrand: what CMOs can learn from Vancity and Exclaimer

Most CMOs still discover brand drift the hard way: a customer-facing email that uses last year's logo, an old campaign banner still sitting under a new visual identity, or a subsidiary sending messages that look nothing like the parent brand. Fixing that by hand does not scale when thousands of people send email every day.

A customer story from Exclaimer, the email signature management company and a partner of our CMO and CAIO summits, shows a cleaner path. It follows Vancity, a Vancouver credit union with 2,600 users in its email environment, as marketing prepared for a major organisational rebrand in early 2026. The lesson is less about signatures and more about who owns brand control in high-volume channels.

The problem marketing and IT shared

Before Exclaimer, Vancity distributed signature templates manually. There was no central way to enforce the current brand, no clear view of who was still on an old version, and a long list of local needs. The team needed around 20 to 30 territorial acknowledgement options based on office location, plus custom fields for pronouns, booking links, branch hours and secondary addresses. Subsidiaries and affiliates needed their own variants.

That created two bottlenecks at once. Marketing could not update campaigns or brand elements without leaning on IT. IT was stuck troubleshooting individual signature problems instead of running the platform. With a full rebrand on the calendar, doing the same work by hand would have made consistent rollout almost impossible.

What changed

Vancity implemented Exclaimer in July 2025. It started with a cross-functional pilot, then moved to brand champions, and finally rolled out organisation-wide for the early 2026 rebrand.

According to the case study, the team can now:

apply consistent signatures across all employees from a central place
automate complex local options, including the territorial acknowledgements and custom fields
let marketing manage templates, campaign banners and brand updates without IT involvement for day-to-day changes
run multiple variants, including full signatures with banners, reply versions, internal-only and external-only versions, and subsidiary-specific templates
schedule quarterly campaign updates in advance
keep fonts, colours, logos and icons in Brand Kits so templates stay aligned
assign the right signature by location, department and other rules

The results listed in the story are simple ones. Initial deployment to test users took 30 to 40 seconds. The territorial acknowledgement options were automated. One hundred per cent of users successfully selected their own default signature.

Sophie Pluck, Senior Marketing Specialist, Brand at Vancity, said: "This has been a long-time dream for our team, and Exclaimer delivered exactly what we needed. Our marketing team now has complete independence to manage quarterly campaigns and brand updates, and leadership is really happy with how everything is working. Getting Exclaimer on board before our rebrand made all the difference and we now have brand consistency across all 2,600 users."

Why Brand Kits matter for CMOs

In January 2026 Exclaimer launched Brand Kits as a governed layer above individual templates. The idea is that logos, colours, fonts and assets are defined once and then reused across email signatures and video meeting branding. When the kit changes, linked templates and meeting themes update with it.

That is the CMO point. Brand control in email and meetings is no longer a design chore for each template. It is a governance system for channels that still carry a large share of day-to-day customer and partner communication. Exclaimer's own research, cited in the Brand Kits announcement, found that nearly half of global IT leaders say most internal and external communication still relies on direct email.

For marketing leaders running multi-brand groups, acquisitions or regional identities, that shift matters. Rebrands, mergers and quarterly campaigns stop being a queue of ticketed template edits and become a controlled update to the shared brand source.

Five lessons for CMOs

1. Own the channel, do not rent it from IT. High-volume email is a brand surface. Marketing needs the rights and tools to change banners, logos and campaigns without waiting for a ticket every time.

2. Do the hard localisation once. Vancity's territorial acknowledgements and custom fields look like edge cases until you try to manage them by hand. Automating the awkward rules is what makes central control usable.

3. Put brand assets above templates. Brand Kits, or an equivalent governed asset layer, stop the same logo living in fifty slightly different files. One change should travel everywhere it needs to.

4. Time the platform before the rebrand. Vancity brought the system in ahead of the 2026 identity change. That sequence is the point. If the rebrand lands first and the tooling second, inconsistency is already live.

5. Measure adoption, not just design quality. A perfect template that half the organisation ignores is still brand risk. Visibility of who is on the current signature turns brand standards into something you can manage.

Questions to take to your next leadership meeting

Who can change a campaign banner in customer email today, and how long does it take?
How many brand variants do we actually need across regions, subsidiaries and reply paths?
Where do our approved logos, colours and fonts live, and what still hard-codes them into templates?
If we rebranded in 90 days, could marketing roll the change without a wave of IT tickets?
Do we know what share of staff are still sending an outdated signature?

The bottom line

CMOs are judged on brand consistency in the places customers actually look. For many organisations that still includes every outbound email. Vancity's story with Exclaimer shows what happens when marketing gets central control before a rebrand, not after the damage is done. The tooling matters, but the operating model matters more: brand kits first, templates second, and IT as the platform owner rather than the bottleneck.

Exclaimer has been a partner across our CMO and CAIO summit programme, including Gold sponsorship at our North Summit. If you want the primary detail, the Vancity customer story and the Brand Kits announcement are both on Exclaimer's own site.