What we learned watching a fast-growing pharmaceutical company unify its brand across dozens of teams

According to Deloitte’s Productivity+ research, 32 days are lost per year from employees toggling between workplace applications to find necessary information. That’s over a month of productive time, vanished, simply because marketing teams can’t find the branded assets they need.

Pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing is a coordination sport. Brand teams, creative agencies, regulatory reviewers, internal stakeholders, partner vendors, everyone touches the brand, and every touch introduces risk. Not the dramatic kind of risk that makes headlines, but the slow erosion that happens when a hundred small inconsistencies compound over time.

When you’re producing campaigns, presentations, packaging, sales materials, web content, social posts, email campaigns and conference assets across multiple teams, one small variation can create problems that ripple through the organization for months: incorrect logo usage, off-brand color palettes, out-of-date photography that should have been updated three versions ago, assets living in five different folders depending on who last touched them, and endless “Can you send me the latest version?” emails that consume more time than anyone wants to admit.

One of the fastest-growing generic pharmaceutical companies felt this challenge clearly. While scaling rapidly, they had four to six external agencies creating content, an internal brand team distributing guidance, sales teams needing approved collateral immediately, and regulatory review cycles to maintain compliance. Everyone was doing excellent work. But the workflow behind the work was slowing everything down.

 

The problem wasn’t the people. It was the infrastructure.

Before centralization, their brand assets lived everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. SharePoint libraries held some files. Dropbox folders contained others. Local designer and agency hard drives stored working versions that sometimes never made it to shared drives. Email attachments got forwarded through threads until no one remembered which version was current. No one intended this chaos. But complexity compounds silently until the system breaks. And then someone in a meeting asks which logo to use, and three people give three different answers, and suddenly you realize the foundation underneath all your marketing is shakier than anyone wants to acknowledge.

I’ve spent a lot of years watching organizations deal with this exact problem. The technical challenges were always solvable, we could implement SharePoint, configure permissions, set up folder structures, create naming conventions. But the human challenges persisted. People would forget the naming convention. Designers would save working files locally. Agencies would use the version they had rather than confirming it was current. The system would gradually drift toward entropy no matter how carefully we designed it.

What this company recognized was that they didn’t need more rules or better training. They needed fundamentally different infrastructure. They needed one place where brand actually lives, not scattered fragments of brand scattered across systems that were never designed to hold it. This home would be the Brand Center built with IMPGo with the power of Digital Asset Management (or DAM) and the creative tools to drive marketing. 

 

Building a centralized Brand Center

Working with a top-tier branding agency on a comprehensive rebrand, they decided to build proper infrastructure from the beginning rather than retrofit it later. The Brand Center isn’t a folder structure or a file repository. It’s a centralized system for brand management, giving internal teams and all partner agencies a single source of truth for logos, images, photography, video, and designed templates. Additionally, a powerful gallery system was developed to allow for distribution of creative assets to individuals instead of downloading, emailing or uploading into another drop box location. 

Brand guidelines live embedded in the system rather than in PDF documents people might or might not have read. Usage rules exist at the asset level, not in separate documentation. Self-serve access means agencies can find and download approved assets without emailing anyone. 

Everyone now creates from the same foundation. Every update propagates instantly. No one asks “Which version should I use?” because there’s only one version, and it’s always the current one.

The cultural shift happened faster than anyone expected. Once people experienced finding an asset in seconds instead of hunting for an hour, the old way of working became obviously unsustainable. It’s like the first time you use GPS navigation after years of printed MapQuest directions, you can’t believe you tolerated the old system for as long as you did.

 

What IMPGo replaces (and what it doesn’t)

IMPGo doesn’t replace creativity. It replaces the operational drag around creativity. It doesn’t replace strategic thinking. It replaces the time spent searching for files instead of thinking strategically. It doesn’t replace human judgment. It replaces the anxiety of wondering whether you’re using the approved version or the one that’s going to get you called into a compliance review meeting.

SharePoint links scattered everywhere become a single source of truth. Daily “Can you send the latest?” emails become instant self-service access. Compliance anxiety on every campaign becomes controlled by approvals with audit history. Brand drift across six agencies becomes one unified standard. Three-to-six-week asset production cycles become three-to-seven-day turnarounds in most cases.

The transformation isn’t about adding more technology. It’s about replacing fragmented systems with coherent infrastructure.

 

The bigger lesson about complexity

Marketing complexity isn’t going away. Pharmaceutical companies will continue managing multiple business units and product lines, distributed sales teams and partner networks, external agencies and creative vendors, regulatory compliance requirements, and digital transformation across proliferating channels. That complexity is structural. It’s built into how modern pharmaceutical marketing works.

But brand fragmentation isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice, even if it’s usually an unconscious one. Organizations drift toward fragmentation because the path of least resistance leads there. The designer saves files locally because it’s faster than uploading. The agency uses the version they already have because finding the current one takes fifteen minutes. Sales rep makes a copy of a presentation and edits it rather than requesting a new version through official channels. Each individual decision makes sense in isolation. Collectively, they create chaos.

What this fast-growing pharmaceutical company did is replicable. It’s operational discipline, not organizational luck. It’s recognizing that brand infrastructure deserves the same attention we give to financial systems or CRM platforms. When the brand lives in one place, the brand shows up everywhere the right way.

 

If you’re managing multiple agencies, markets, or business units

The symptoms are recognizable: version confusion across teams, compliance anxiety around scattered assets, slow creative production cycles, brand inconsistency across channels, endless “where’s the file?” emails that shouldn’t be anyone’s full-time job.

If that describes your organization, you need what IMPGo built. Not because centralization is theoretically superior, but because the alternative is measurably expensive in time, money, and brand equity.

We can show you how this works in practice. A twenty-minute walkthrough of a pharmaceutical our Brand Center workflow, focused on your specific environment and challenges. No sales pitch, just the mechanics of how thousands of brand assets get organized, accessed, and distributed across dozens of teams without chaos.

If you’re ready to unify your marketing stack, reduce costs, and accelerate growth, let’s talk. Schedule a free consultation today to see how IMPGo can transform your marketing.

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