M&S Money

M&S is one of Britain's most trusted brands – loved for food, fashion, home and beauty. But when it came to financial services, something wasn't landing.

M&S Bank offered credit cards, travel money, insurance, savings and loans. Products millions of customers could genuinely benefit from.  But they weren't talking to each other or to the M&S brand customers already knew and loved.

We were approached to change that. To create a financial services brand worthy of the M&S name, unify the business, and give customers a reason to actually feel something about money.
From utility to electricity

We began where every good rebrand begins: with real people. We spoke with 25 stakeholders, audited every touchpoint, visited stores and explored existing customer research.

What we found was clear. Internally, there was huge ambition, but financial services wasn't showing up with the same confidence as the rest of M&S. Customers felt it too. They trusted M&S implicitly, but that trust wasn't translating into financial products.

Shaping the strategy

In a strategic workshop with the M&S team, one insight stood out. M&S didn't have a reputation problem. It had a feeling problem. The opportunity was to move from utility to electricity, creating a brand with the same energy customers experienced everywhere else in M&S.

From that came a single creative north star: Bring the energy of M&S to money.

Creative development and testing

We developed creative routes before taking them back to customers. They responded most strongly to work that felt unmistakably M&S. The warmth, colour, playfulness and confidence they already loved. They didn't just want to see the M&S logo. They wanted to feel M&S. That insight shaped everything from photography and tone of voice to how products appeared across every touchpoint.
Making money feel like M&S

We brought financial products into the M&S world by connecting them with products customers already know and love. An analogy-led system paired everything from cards and cashmere to travel money and beachwear, replacing generic financial imagery with something warmer, more emotional and uniquely ownable to M&S. Each product was then given its own world through colour, photography and tone – from the energy of travel to the reassurance of insurance and quiet confidence of savings.

Building M&S Money and Sparks as one family

With Sparks undergoing its own rebrand at the same time, we designed M&S Money to feel like a genuine sibling from day one. The identity shares Sparks’ confident, elevated character, with black creating a backdrop for the colour and warmth of M&S products and a dynamic capsule graphic providing a distinctive signature. The result is two related brands designed to reinforce each other while retaining their own roles.

Making financial services clearer and more connected

We combined M&S’ familiar tone of voice with a clear messaging hierarchy – analogy-led storytelling to build the brand, benefit-led copy to explain products and Sparks rewards, and Consumer Duty embedded throughout. We then rolled the system across physical cards, carriers, brochures, POS, screens, web, CRM, email, campaigns and OOH, supported by a comprehensive brand book covering architecture, identity, voice and compliance.
This wasn’t just a fresh look. It gave M&S the financial identity it had always deserved – shaped in close collaboration with customers, internal teams and leadership, and rooted in the warmth and character of the M&S brand.

The result is M&S Money: a financial brand that feels authentically M&S, extending a relationship built over generations into the trips customers are planning, the things they’re protecting and the futures they’re building.

Tom Speed

Head of Acquisition & Brand

“It’s been great working on this project with Whippet. It’s felt very collaborative from the start. What we’ve been doing is making sure we ground everything in customer insight… keeping the customer in mind but getting to an outcome that feels truly M&S. The Whippet team have worked with us for a long time and it’s great to see that hard work and thinking come into our final deliverables.”

Bringing the energy of M&S to money