When companies need a better way to manage their brands, assets, guidelines, and resources, they have a choice to make: build their own system or buy a ready-made brand platform. It’s hard to know which is the best option, as the “right” answer depends on timelines, priorities, and budgets.
This guide explains the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, with examples of global businesses that chose Frontify’s flexible platform.
Option 1: Build your own platform
One approach companies take to manage their brand and associated assets is to build their own system or platform. Some use an intranet like SharePoint, while others focus on custom integrations with their content management systems. While these two methods are different, the reasoning behind them is the same: The companies believe that building their own brand management system is their best option to leverage their existing technology and create the exact structure, functionality, and integrations they need.
But building your own brand management tools requires substantial time and investment, so organizations must carefully weigh whether the benefits justify the costs.
Advantages of a custom build
A custom system or platform for managing your brand can offer several advantages:
Skipping the vendor onboarding hassle
With a custom build, you avoid the time-consuming vendor onboarding process that typically involves extensive research, approvals, and negotiations. You won’t need your IT, security, or procurement teams to conduct lengthy compliance checks, which can be especially complex when dealing with global or international providers.
There’s also no need to set up a new vendor in your internal systems or navigate procurement bureaucracy.
Expanding your existing tech stack
You can build your brand management platform on top of your existing tech stack and connect the tools and platforms your teams are already familiar with instead of choosing a new system for them to learn and use.
Using your existing resources
Using your existing resources, developing a custom brand management system doesn’t (necessarily) require any additional budget or resources. You can work with your existing team and tech stack instead of investing in procuring new software.
Disadvantages of a custom build
Building solutions has clear trade-offs versus buying ready-built platforms.
Investing time to build
A custom brand platform requires months of development work. Your team will invest a lot of time building, testing, and tweaking before the system can be rolled out across the business.
This is a big undertaking. Here are some of the features and functionality that your team has to build, but that are included in ready-built platforms:
- User management and onboarding for internal and external teams
- Blocks for building online brand guidelines
- Relationships between guidelines and DAM
- Options for organizing, managing, and publicly sharing assets
- Asset and template libraries
- Integrations between the brand platform and design and communication software
The longer it takes to build, the longer your teams have to wait to use the platform. But if you rush the development process, you risk having a system that doesn’t work properly and doesn’t meet your organization’s needs and standards.
Considering ongoing maintenance
Many enterprises forget platform maintenance when planning a custom build. However, ensuring the systems continue working correctly will require significant work on an ongoing basis:
- Bug fixes
- Error troubleshooting
- User management and support
- Integrations with new tools in your tech stack
- New functionality as business needs change
These additional features are usually unplanned and mean dedicating additional time and resources to the development process.
Ensuring security
To securely store and manage all brand materials and data, developers need to build a custom platform that meets the industry’s highest security standards. They have to ensure it’s accessible to everyone in the business — and external collaborators, if relevant — without introducing any security risks.
Future-proofing and scaling
Your platform needs to work for your business in two, three, or five years. You’ll need to continue investing to add new functionality, maintain security, and adapt to the changing needs of the business or brand.
For example, today your business may be a single brand, but a couple of strategic acquisitions could turn it into a multi-brand company. Your custom platform must handle the increased number of assets and a more complex brand structure.
Option 2: Choose Frontify’s ready-built brand platform
While building their own platform is an approach for some enterprise companies, many prefer the more straightforward option: a ready-built system like Frontify. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of buying, rather than building, a brand management platform.
Advantages of Frontify’s brand platform
Buying a ready-built system for managing your brand offers companies several advantages.
Time to value
You can start using a ready-built platform — and get value from it — in just a few weeks. This includes user onboarding and transferring data and brand materials from old platforms. In fact, new customers are able to get set up in just 4–12 weeks.
Purpose-built platform
Frontify provides purpose-built brand portals, DAM, guidelines, and templates. The platform is built on the feedback and expertise from over 1,000 customers and brand leaders. We provide what global brands want exactly as they want it to be. But in reality, it’s never that simple: brands often run into problems due to technology or team constraints and end up with a platform that’s more rigid than they imagined.
Pre-built integrations
Frontify connects with many leading tools that companies use every day — from design and creative software to communication and productivity apps. If you’re using tools that we don’t (yet) have native integrations for, you can build your own or use a third-party connector.
Enterprise-level security
Frontify’s brand management platform is certified against the best industry standards. It complies with leading global data regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. We continuously invest in platform security via our in-house team and an official bug bounty program.
Vendor support
When buying a pre-built platform, high-quality experts ensure everything is set up and works properly. Frontify provides dedicated support beyond the initial onboarding: whether you’re trying to figure out how to best structure your DAM libraries or struggling to get an integration working, our team is here to help you succeed.
Disadvantages of Frontify’s brand platform
While ready-built brand platforms like Frontify offer several advantages, they also come with notable disadvantages compared to building your own solution.
Not completely bespoke
You can’t customize every single aspect of a ready-built platform to match your exact specifications. The trade-off is that you get a proven solution that’s been refined through real-world use by thousands of businesses, including leading enterprise companies with varied and complex brand structures.
Capital investment
SaaS platforms like Frontify require a substantial annual investment that grows with your company. However, the software cost can often be offset with smart tool consolidation: Frontify’s brand platform combines a full-featured DAM with online guidelines, creative templating, and portals. Many of our customers find that this allows them to replace multiple tools.
Brand spotlights: Enterprise companies that chose to buy, not build
We help teams all over the world manage their assets and improve brand adoption. Here are some of the enterprise companies that chose Frontify.
Bosch
The Bosch Group — an international, multi-brand organization headquartered in Germany — manages huge quantities of marketing materials. It used a 3,600-page brand book and 17 separate sets of guidelines across the organization, meaning that consistency was a big challenge globally. In 2019, Bosch started using Frontify, rolling it out in phases and increasing its functionality. The teams documented the brand guidelines in a central, online location — creating one single source of truth, not 17 different versions.
Then they added an icon library in the Frontify DAM, set up their design system, and built an online marketing toolbox. This phased implementation meant Bosch started getting value from the platform early on and could scale it to meet its changing needs.
“Frontify’s platform offers flexibility and scalability, allowing us to quickly adapt to changing needs while ensuring consistent branding across all touchpoints.” - Jörg Heidrich, Manager Digital Brand and UX at Bosch
Mercedes-Benz
The brand design system experts at Mercedes-Benz had outgrown its old brand management system, which was a very expensive custom CMS solution. The team needed more customization possibilities and more integrations than the old system would allow. Instead of building something in-house, Mercedes-Benz switched to Frontify.
Frontify’s platform met the security requirements and also helped everyone in the organization to better connect and engage with the brand. It also gave the teams lots of flexibility — by developing custom blocks for their guidelines, for example.
Now, Mercedes-Benz is able to visually manage all its brands (Mercedes-Benz, Mercedes-AMG, and Mercedes-Maybach) and entities in one unified design system with Frontify.
Telefónica
Global telecoms company Telefónica encompasses brands across 16 global markets and multiple languages. Each company had its way of working, including its own tool stack for managing assets and information. This created silos between the teams in Telefónica’s ecosystem.
With so many brands to manage — each with its guidelines, assets, and materials — Telefónica needed an accessible system that was scalable, flexible, and secure. Frontify provided just that, and for the first time, Telefónica has been able to manage all its brands within one platform.
Now, Telefónica has one centralized platform to manage all its sub-brands in 16 markets. It uses the Frontify DAM to store, organize, and manage over 717K assets and has scaled to more than 17K users across all brand teams.
“To be able to manage all brand materials and workflows at the same time in one unique space for all countries and brands is the main benefit and a milestone for Telefónica.” - Cristina Terrón Moreno, Account Manager at Telefónica
Experience the power of Frontify
While building your own platform may seem like an appealing option, it’s often far easier, faster, and more efficient to use Frontify — a solution that’s already built and used by thousands of other companies worldwide.
The Frontify platform scales with your organization. It streamlines brand management and encourages adoption thanks to its flexible navigation and customizable structure, seamless integrations, collaborative workspaces, and valuable usage data. With all your materials centralized in one place, your Frontify-powered brand remains consistent, efficient, and uniquely you.
Book a demo today to learn more about how the Frontify platform helps companies overcome their brand-building challenges.
