Strengthening Enterprise SharePoint Branding: Beyond Themes and Templates

There’s a moment that happens in almost every enterprise SharePoint rollout. The technical implementation is complete. Permissions are aligned. Governance is documented. Migration scripts have run successfully. Yet when business users log in for the first time, the reaction is underwhelming: “It still just feels like SharePoint.” That gap between technical success and experiential success is almost always a branding problem. After years of working with enterprise deployments of SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365, and modern intranet architectures, I’ve come to see branding not as surface-level design—but as a structural decision that influences adoption, governance, and even architectural patterns. And strengthening enterprise SharePoint branding is far more nuanced than choosing a color palette. ## Branding as Architecture, Not Decoration In many organizations, branding discussions start too late. The technical team builds out communication sites, hub sites, and document libraries, and