This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Francisca Peixoto.
Branding is not just about how an organisation looks externally; it’s just as important internally. Externally, it shapes how your company is perceived, where small inconsistencies (an outdated logo, mismatched colours, off-brand fonts) can quickly undermine credibility. Internally, consistent visuals and language reinforce identity and professionalism.
Until recently, maintaining this level of consistency required dedicated design teams and resources, putting truly polished corporate branding out of reach for many organisations. What’s changing in the age of AI is that creating on-brand content is becoming faster and more accessible. A strong design team still makes a huge difference, but their role is shifting: from producing every asset, to defining systems and guiding AI-powered creation at scale.
As this becomes easier, the real challenge shifts to distribution: making sure those brand systems show up consistently wherever work happens.
Working with customers on their Microsoft 365 environments for several years, I’ve seen first-hand how challenging it is for organisations to keep a consistent look, feel and tone across all apps and services. Microsoft’s Brand Center was supposed to solve that. Here’s an honest assessment of where it delivers, and where it still falls short.
What Is the Brand Center?
Launched in 2024, Brand Center was initially perceived by IT admins and brand managers as the much-needed solution to brand consistency in Microsoft 365.
According to Microsoft’s official documentation, Brand Center is an integrated branding management application inside SharePoint that centralises your company’s brand assets (colours, fonts, logos, templates) and makes them easily accessible across Microsoft 365. The idea is straightforward: define your official branding in one place, and every site or app in M365 pulls from those definitions for a consistent, professional presentation.
But how well does it work in practice? Based on my experience, I’ll break down where Brand Center truly delivers value, where it falls short, and what improvements could make it even better.
Top Use Cases & Real-World Benefits
Define Once, Use Everywhere: Tenant-Wide Themes and Fonts
For me, this is Brand Center’s killer feature: it allows easy creation of custom SharePoint themes and fonts across all sites, without complex scripts. Up until 2024, if you wanted your corporate colours or a special font on every SharePoint site, you either had to run PowerShell or just hope site owners stuck to the few standard themes.
Brand Center changed that. A brand manager (or IT admin) can define a custom colour palette so that it shows up as an option in the “Change the look > Theme” panel on every SharePoint site. The same applies to fonts — upload your company’s font files into Brand Center and they become available under “Change the look > Font”.
This means any site owner can apply the exact approved colours and fonts in a couple of clicks.
One-Stop Portal for Logos, Images & Templates
Brand Center is a SharePoint Communication Site pre-built to serve as a brand portal for employees. Designated site owners can:
- Curate official logos, product images, document templates, and written guidelines
- Publish pages on how to use the brand (e.g. dos and don’ts for logo usage), creating a brand-focused knowledge hub
Technically, Brand Center uses Organisation Asset Libraries (OALs) to store and distribute these “official” assets — more on this below.
This self-service approach for asset distribution saves enormous time for marketing and comms teams who would otherwise field constant requests for assets.
Integrating Brand Assets into Everyday Workflows
Once Organisation Asset Libraries are set up, everyone in your organisation will start seeing:
- A new “Your organisation” section in the Microsoft 365 image pickers (e.g. when adding an image to a PowerPoint slide or SharePoint page) that surfaces only approved images and logos from your Brand Center site
- A new tab in Word, Excel or PowerPoint desktop apps (and PowerPoint on the web) that surfaces custom-made Office templates
Microsoft’s vision for Brand Center was to have brand assets managed centrally but distributed to the apps people use every day — so combining Brand Center with OALs made sense. If OALs exist, Brand Center is automatically set up on top of the site where these have been configured.
Low Overhead for IT, High Empowerment for Comms/Marketing
From an IT admin perspective, Brand Center is a great example of IT enabling the business by providing tools that empower people without creating ongoing dependencies. It largely runs itself once your designated brand manager or communications team is promoted to site owner.
Brand assets are stored in SharePoint, which means standard permissions and version history apply, useful for both security and lifecycle management. With minimal training, the marketing team can update the company’s official theme or refresh a logo themselves, without raising IT tickets.
Where Brand Center Falls Short
“Centralised” — But Not Really
Brand Center falls short of being truly central due to the fragmented setup required across features and experiences:
- Setup requires manual steps: Organisation Asset Libraries, essential to any effective brand strategy, are not created automatically when you set up Brand Center. They must be manually configured using PowerShell, adding friction to what should be a seamless experience.
- Fonts don’t fully carry across: Custom fonts added to Brand Center are only enabled for SharePoint — not for Office apps. Enabling custom fonts for PowerPoint and Word on the web requires additional PowerShell configuration.
- Brand usage isn’t consistent across apps: With the rise of AI, Brand Center assets are starting to appear in Copilot-driven experiences, but the integration is not seamless. Asking Copilot in PowerPoint to “create one slide about integrity using our brand template” works after some prompting, but Copilot doesn’t automatically know you only have one approved template.
Images and logos from OALs are not consistently applied either, unless additional scripting is done to grant Copilot access to the relevant folders.
- Duplicate setup efforts across Microsoft 365 apps: Asking Microsoft 365 Copilot (app or web) or Clipchamp to generate branded content does not reliably apply Brand Center assets. Both scenarios require setting up separate Brand Kits, which are completely independent of Brand Center and must be configured and maintained in parallel. This creats exactly the fragmentation Brand Center was meant to solve. Create and manage official Brand kits in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app - Microsoft Support
Customisation Gaps for Advanced Branding
While you can create a new theme in Brand Center, the theme designer is over-simplified. You pick primary and secondary colours to create up to 16 colour combinations, which can be applied to page sections and other elements like the header. Most out-of-the-box web parts will adjust accordingly, but if your brand guidelines are specific for each UI element, the current tool won’t let you fine-tune those.
No Way to Apply Themes at Scale
There’s no built-in way to apply a newly created theme out to all existing SharePoint sites. You still have to rely on scripts or manual updates on a site-by-site basis. This is a major pain point if you manage hundreds or thousands of sites, particularly during a corporate rebrand.
Limited Governance & Enforcement
Although Brand Center aims to centralise branding, control ultimately remains with individual site owners. Once themes and font packages are available, any SharePoint site owner can change their site’s appearance, choosing different colours or fonts that may not align with corporate standards. There is no built-in admin setting to restrict or enforce the use of approved branding across sites.
This challenge has become more pronounced with the introduction of Site Branding which is almost a mini–Brand Center UI for site owners — a site-level branding tool that site owners can access from their SharePoint Settings menu. Although encouraged to stay on-brand, site owners can still create custom font packages and pick their own custom colours, creating misaligned themes.
While administrators can use PowerShell to disable site branding on individual site collections (see Tobias Asböck blog post), this requires additional technical configuration. Maintaining consistent branding across your tenant therefore depends on extra governance steps — adding complexity to what should be a centralised experience.
No Analytics or Usage Insights
Brand Center doesn’t surface any metrics on asset usage or compliance. You can’t see which sites are using which themes, which sites have deviated from the approved brand, or how often published assets are actually used by end users. Once assets are published, you have to trust that people are using them correctly, with no way to verify.
One Brand Only: A Problem for Complex Organisations
Brand Center only supports one central site for the entire tenant. There’s no concept of multiple brand centers or separate branding profiles. In a small business with a single brand, this is fine. In a diversified organisation with multiple sub-brands or product lines, it quickly becomes a constraint.
In a multi-geo environment, Brand Center only exists in your primary region. Fonts and themes created there cannot be hidden from a specific geo using native visibility toggles or audience targeting. The possible workarounds — tying sites to Regional Hub Sites for theme inheritance, or turning off “Change the look” entirely — introduce operational complexity that undermines the promise of centralised branding.
Conclusion: A Good Foundation That Needs More
Brand Center was a meaningful step forward for tenant-wide branding in Microsoft 365. For mid-sized organisations with straightforward brand requirements, it already adds real value and is worth enabling now, provided you understand its constraints.
For larger enterprises with complex branding needs, Brand Center is a useful addition to the toolkit, not a replacement for your broader branding governance processes. The gaps are real: stronger enforcement controls, bulk application, cross-app consistency, and usage analytics are all still missing.
That said, I’m genuinely excited to see how Microsoft evolves this space. The platform is finally helping us with brand consistency, rather than working against us — and that is a welcome shift.
At BindTuning, the governance and visibility gaps in Brand Center are exactly the challenges we’ve been focused on. Pulse365 surfaces the brand compliance insights that Brand Center doesn’t — helping organisations understand where brand consistency breaks down across hundreds of sites, without scripting or manual audits. If you’re navigating these challenges, we’d love to show you how it works.
→ Start on the right foot with our Brand Center Template, built from real-world deployment experience.
