Creative Direction

Creative Direction and Brand Strategy: Loyalty, ExtraCare and ExtraCare Plus

As a Lead Designer and Strategist, my role extended beyond product architecture into defining the visual and creative strategy for CVS Health's flagship loyalty programs, ExtraCare and ExtraCare Plus. I specialized in scaling brand narratives across fragmented touchpoints, ensuring that high-impact marketing initiatives felt seamless, engaging, and unified.

Case Study: Gamification Launch

Challenge

The ExtraCare team decided to launch a gamification test program to increase shopper engagement, by creating routines in our customers. While acting as the lead product designer for the project (more on that here), I was also tasked with ensuring the creative direction for the entire campaign was unified across every narrative touch point.

Strategy

I acted as the creative strategist and "central node" for the entire cross-functional launch. I established the unified creative vision and designed the framework that connected disparate teams, including:

• In store assets: Partnering with the Store Experience team to curate Banners, Aisle Caps, Blades, Stanchions, mats, etc. as part of the awareness entry points of this new campaign.
• Marketing communications: Partnering with the CRM, marketing ops and campaign teams to ensure consistent language, messaging and imagery throughout engagement campaigns.
• Digital experiences: Led the design and development of every asset utilized across .com, app, and in-store digital experiences, which would then become the basis for the direction followed by other teams.

The Value

By serving as the creative bridge, I eliminated cross-departmental silos, ensured absolute brand consistency across the entire user journey, and streamlined the production pipeline for an on-time, highly successful launch.

Creative direction for this project also included the creation of a graphic style for the following families of "Products":

• Punch cards: routine creators
• Badges: affinity builders

For the punch card family, this meant creating and documenting a series of components that could be expanded upon when growing the program post launch. Where each component could be customized and personalized for a unique customer experience that continued building brand loyalty, and enticed customers to return to CVS.

As for the badge family, this entailed collaborating directly with the business and the "A&BC" (Analytics and behavioral change) teams to determine which accomplishments would be best suited to highlight during a pilot. After these were identified, we kicked off the process of creating a series of unified graphics, names and taglines that were in line with the broader CVS brand, while keeping a sense of fun for the customer.

As the Creative Lead, I established the direction for both of these products and all their related assets, to ensure a smooth and seamless omni-channel experience.

Case Study: Scaling a Brand System

Challenge

The existing creative direction for the ExtraCare brand was originally architected under a highly limiting, print-media framework. When applied to digital products, the assets felt rigid, lacked scalability, and restricted dynamic user interactions. With a shift to digital interactions during and after the pandemic, different digital product teams across the organization started creating their own set of assets to promote our loyalty programs in different places. The result was a mismatched set of banners, cards, language guides, icons and illustrations that felt inconsistent, dated, and did not communicate the brand well.

The Strategy

Seeing this as a problem that needed to be addressed, I volunteered to tackle it and scale a new system that could be used across different product teams and in different ecosystems. I led the initiative to adapt and modernize the print strategy for a digital-first medium. I reimagined the typography hierarchies, color usage, and spatial layouts to ensure accessibility, responsiveness, and visual impact across web and mobile platforms without losing core brand equity.

The Value

Successfully bridged the gap between traditional brand marketing and modern product design, giving our product teams a flexible, scalable visual language to build with.