How to Build a Brand Portal

The Power of a Brand Portal

For large companies, maintaining brand consistency across global teams is no small feat. Between multiple markets, creative teams, and external partners, ensuring everyone has easy access to the right assets, guidelines, and workflows can be overwhelming. That’s where a Brand Portal comes in.

A well-designed Brand Portal serves as a centralised hub where teams can efficiently access brand assets, guidelines, templates, and workflows. It improves brand consistency, saves time, and streamlines collaboration. But where do you start when building one? At Brightful, we recently had the opportunity to help Philip Morris International (PMI) develop a new Brand Portal as part of a broader transformation of their content operations. Based on our experience, here’s what it takes to build a robust and effective Brand Portal for your organisation.

How Brightful Helped PMI Build a new Brand Portal

PMI, a global company with multiple brands and markets, faced significant inefficiencies in their content production processes. Their marketing and creative teams were struggling with:

• Costly and time-consuming content creation & transcreation
• Scattered brand assets across multiple platforms
• Manual cross-referencing between systems
• Inconsistent workflows leading to delays and errors

To solve these challenges, we worked closely with PMI to assess their existing workflows, pain points, and technology stack. We then worked with key stakeholder and market users to research, conceptualise and ultimately design a bespoke Brand Portal. The portal was a key foundation in centralising all brand-related assets, improves search functionality, and integrates with PMI’s existing content operations. The result? A seamless, efficient, and scalable solution that saves time, effort and increased productivity across global teams.

Where to Start When Building a Brand Portal?

If your organisation already produces large volumes of marketing assets, chances are you already have a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system in place. While off-the-shelf solutions like Frontify or Bynder offer great features, larger businesses often need tailored solutions to address specific operational needs.

When working with PMI, we discovered that their teams relied on four different DAMs and regularly had to manually cross-reference assets and information between them. To create an efficient and scalable solution, we first mapped their workflows and key pain points to identify essential features & functionalities for their new Brand Portal.

If you’re considering building a Brand Portal, start by assessing your current processes:

• Assess your current tech stack – What systems are currently in place
• Identify pain points – What slows down your teams
• Define must-have features – What will make your Brand Portal truly valuable?

Technology Considerations: Ensuring Seamless Integration

A Brand Portal doesn’t operate in isolation—it needs to fit into your organisation’s broader technology ecosystem. That means ensuring smooth integration with your existing DAM, project management tools, marketing automation platforms, and content management systems (CMS).

For PMI, their Brand Portal needed to work alongside Adobe Workfront, Adobe Experience Manager, and various other internal systems. Our goal was to minimise manual effort by allowing teams to access and use assets directly within the platforms they already worked with.

When building a Brand Portal, consider:

• DAM Integration – Ensure assets stored in your DAM are accessible within the portal
• Workflow Automation – Connect the portal to project management tools to automate asset requests and approvals
• Access Permissions – Implement role-based access to ensure the right people see the right assets
• Customisation and Permissions – If you have a unique workflow, ensure the portal can be tailored to support your processes.

User-Friendly Interface: Keeping It Simple & Intuitive

No matter how powerful your Brand Portal is, if it’s clunky and unintuitive, adoption will be slow. The key is to design an experience that feels familiar and easy to navigate.

For PMI, we took inspiration from e-commerce platforms like H&M and ASOS, creating a browsing experience rather than just a search tool:

• Homepage with brand categories for easy navigation
• Basket system to collect assets before download
• Checkout-style brief creation for asset modifications and localisation requests

By making the UI intuitive and engaging, we ensured a smooth onboarding experience for users across internal teams and markets. We also involved those that worked within their current process to give us valuable feedback, ensuring that our new experience would align with their needs. 

Advanced Search & Smart Tagging: Find Assets in Seconds

When an organisation manages thousands of assets, searchability is everything. If users can’t find what they need in a few clicks, frustration builds, and productivity suffers.

For PMI, we implemented powerful search features:

• Predictive Search – Auto-suggestions based on user behaviour and commonly searched terms
• Smart Tagging – Using AI automation to tag assets with relevant keywords for better filtering
• User-Based Recommendations – Displaying personalised content based on the user’s region, job role, and past searches
• Asset Expiry Warnings – Highlighting assets with upcoming expiration dates to prevent outdated materials from being used (this was a critical issue for PMI, as expired assets could result in hefty legal costs).

By enhancing search functionality, PMI’s teams could find what they needed in seconds rather than minutes or hours.

Digitised Playbooks: Say Goodbye to Outdated PowerPoints

One of PMI’s biggest inefficiencies? They were managing brand guidelines and asset references in PowerPoint files which quickly became outdated, leading to confusion and wasted time.

We digitised their Brand Playbooks, integrating them directly into the Brand Portal so that:

• Updates happen in real-time
• Users no longer need to cross-reference static documents
• Searching for assets is simplified and automated

This shift eliminated manual errors and ensured that everyone was always working with the latest brand information.

Personalised User Dashboards: Tailoring the Experience

Different teams within an organisation have different needs. Market users at PMI needed local-specific content, while creative teams needed access to master assets.

To solve this, we built customised user dashboards that surfaced only the most relevant assets based on:

• User role (e.g. Marketer, Designer, Localiser)
• Market location (ensuring only regionally approved assets are visible
• Permission levels (limiting access where necessary)

To enhance personalisation, we also introduced:

• Bookmarking features for frequently used assets
• Smart Collections to group related assets for projects
• Notification alerts when new assets were available

This approach not only made the Brand Portal more user-friendly but also maximised efficiency across teams.

Self-Service Features: Empowering Users & Reducing Bottlenecks

A major challenge PMI faced was overwhelming their transcreation teams with repetitive modification requests—many of which could have been solved with existing assets.

To reduce bottlenecks, we introduced self-service functionalities, allowing users to:

• Select pre-transcreated assets instead of requesting new ones
• Modify certain design elements themselves
• Easily track the most in-demand assets and requests for continuous optimisation

By empowering users to find and adjust the assets they need, PMI’s teams significantly reduced redundant requests and saved time.

The Full Potential of a Bespoke Brand Portal

Building a bespoke Brand Portal isn’t just about storing and organising assets it’s about enhancing workflows, improving collaboration, and ensuring brand consistency across an entire organisation. A well-built Brand Portal can become the central platform for:

• Brand consistency – Ensuring all teams use the right assets
• Workflow optimisation – Reducing manual effort & improving efficiency
• Cross-team collaboration – Uniting creative, marketing & localization teams
• Seamless integrations – Connecting with DAMs, project management tools & more

With strategic planning and the right technology, a Brand Portal can be a game-changer and a core platform for your business’s marketing and creative operations.

Ready to Build Your Own Brand Portal? Let’s Talk!

Building a Brand Portal isn’t just about storing assets it’s about creating a smarter, faster, and more collaborative way of working.

At Brightful, we specialise in helping organisations assess, plan, design, build, and implement Brand Portals that truly meet their business needs.

Let’s chat about how we can create the perfect Brand Portal for your team!