When brands combine: why user experience is the merger challenge no one budgets for

The M&A wave

Mergers and acquisitions are accelerating across sectors that spent the last decade avoiding them. Sky's £1.6 billion acquisition of ITV's media and entertainment business is one recent, visible example, but it's far from isolated, and it's far from confined to broadcasting.

In UK telecoms, Vodafone and Three completed their long-anticipated merger in mid-2025, forming VodafoneThree and creating the country's largest mobile network operator with around 28 million combined subscribers. Vodafone and Three continue operating as separate customer-facing brands even as their networks and infrastructure combine, which is precisely the pattern now repeating across sectors: shared infrastructure underneath, distinct brands on top. Elsewhere in European broadcasting, Germany's RTL secured approval this year to acquire Comcast's Sky Deutschland business, while the Berlusconi family's MediaForEurope group has taken control of Germany's ProSiebenSat.1, extending a pan-European broadcast group that already spans Spain, Italy, and Portugal. In the UK, the BBC has confirmed talks with Channel 4 about combining their streaming platforms, just days after the Sky-ITV deal was announced.

Across telecoms, media, financial services, and retail, the underlying logic is the same: organisations are increasingly concluding that combined scale beats standing alone, whether to compete against digital-native challengers, absorb rising technology costs, or simply consolidate market position. Deal-making of this kind has moved from occasional headline event to a recurring feature of how entire industries restructure themselves.

Every one of these deals is justified, on paper, by a clean strategic story: two organisations combining forces to compete better, spend smarter, or reach further. What that story almost never accounts for is what happens beneath it, in the products, platforms, and everyday digital experiences that customers actually touch.

The challenge on UX UI: two brands, two systems, one customer

M&A activity creates challenges across nearly every function of a business: legal, financial, cultural, operational. This article focuses on one specific challenge that tends to be underestimated relative to its actual cost: the impact of a merger or acquisition on user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. It's rarely treated as a first-order integration risk, and it's consistently one of the most expensive things to get wrong.

Based on our experience supporting organisations through exactly this kind of transition, the pattern repeats with striking consistency. Two combining brands almost always arrive with separate UX/UI solutions, built independently over years by separate teams solving separate problems in separate ways. Left unaddressed, that gap shows up as inconsistent interactions across products, duplicated design and engineering effort solving the same problems twice, and slower iteration as teams struggle to stay aligned on a shared direction. Customers feel this friction directly, often before leadership does: mismatched flows, inconsistent patterns, and a sense that two brands, despite being under one roof, haven't actually become one experience.

The instinct that often follows a deal announcement, to get both brands looking the same, as quickly as possible, is usually the wrong one. Forcing visual convergence too early destroys the brand equity each organisation built independently, and it doesn't solve the underlying problem anyway, since the inconsistency was never really about colour and logo placement. It was about interaction patterns, accessibility standards, and component logic sitting on entirely different foundations.

The approach: a shared system, not a shared look

The alternative is to separate what needs to be shared from what needs to stay distinct, and build a system that enforces that separation deliberately. In practice, that means establishing common UX patterns (shared interaction models, navigation logic, and component behaviour) so switching between experiences doesn't feel like switching between products from different eras. It means shared accessibility standards, built once centrally and inherited everywhere, rather than re-solved, or missed, brand by brand. And it means a shared core component library (the buttons, cards, forms, and modules that make up most of any digital experience), built once and consumed by both brands, with brand-specific visual tokens and theming layered on top so each brand still looks and feels like itself.

Done well, this approach delivers benefits that compound well past the initial integration. It creates a shared foundation early, before divergence has calcified into technical debt, which is materially cheaper than untangling two systems after the fact. It aligns design and engineering around a common source of truth, so decisions get resolved by pointing at the system rather than by opinion. It lets both brands iterate faster as the system matures, because new features are faster to design, build, and test once than twice. And it prevents brand divergence from quietly becoming technical debt in the first place, the unglamorous win that determines whether an integration programme stays on budget or runs years over.

 

Where AI Changes the Equation

What's shifted recently is how fast this work can actually happen. UX discipline is what decides which patterns two brands must share and which must stay distinct. 
But doing that manually, screen by screen, across two full legacy estates, has traditionally taken years. That is exactly the kind of timeline that stalls integration programmes before they finish.

AI-accelerated tooling changes that timeline materially, and it does so on both sides of the problem, not just the design side. 
On the design and alignment front, AI is genuinely useful for comparing component libraries across two brands, flagging where interaction patterns diverge without good reason, and surfacing redundant or conflicting UI elements that a purely manual audit would take far longer to catch. 
AI can learn design assets by analysing a design system's components, styles, design tokens, and usage patterns. By understanding how buttons, typography, colours, icons, spacing, and layouts are structured and reused, AI can generate new designs that follow established brand and UX guidelines. This enables faster prototyping, more consistent interfaces, and automated design suggestions while ensuring new screens align with the organisation's existing design system.

But the bigger shift is on the development side, where the real bottleneck usually sits. Two merging brands typically bring two separate, ageing codebases behind their interfaces: different frameworks, different component architectures, sometimes different programming languages entirely, built up over years by different teams with different conventions. AI agents can now take on a meaningful share of that work directly: analysing legacy front-end code, mapping it against a target design system, generating much of the replacement component code, and running the associated test suites, all within a fraction of the time a manual rebuild would take. This doesn't remove engineers from the loop; every merge still passes through human review, and the judgment calls about architecture and risk stay firmly with the development team. What it removes is the sheer manual grind of translation, the time spent simply understanding what old code does before anyone can safely change it. 

Put together, AI-accelerated design alignment and AI-accelerated development are what let a shared UX foundation actually get built, end to end, inside the kind of timeline a live commercial deal allows, rather than the multi-year timeline the same work would need if it were done by hand at every stage. 
None of this replaces UX judgment about what should be shared and what should stay distinct. That decision still has to be made deliberately. But it removes the execution bottleneck, on both the design and the engineering side, that used to make good UX judgment impossible to act on within a real deal timeline.

How Open Reply Supports This

This is the specific problem Open Reply's Experience Design capability is built around: establishing the shared UX foundation for organisations navigating exactly this kind of brand convergence, from user research and pattern definition through to component-level design tokens. All of this is delivered with AI-accelerated tooling that turns what used to be a multi-year design and rebuild effort into something achievable within a live commercial deal timeline. Rather than treating UX as an afterthought to the technology integration, or as a rebrand exercise once the systems are already joined, our approach puts the shared design system at the centre of the integration itself, because it's usually the thing standing between a merger that looks good on paper and one that customers actually experience as a single, coherent brand.