Branding is one of the most important investments your organisation will ever make, but how much does branding cost? Before you brief an agency, a designer or any other external supplier, it’s worth doing a little homework. All too often, costs can run on, and scope creep can make branding much more expensive than you’d ever budgeted for.

The first question you should ask yourself is, what exactly do we need?

Things you might need to create your brand:

1. Logo
   Every brand needs a logo. But how do you brief a designer to create one? How will the designer know whether it’s right? How will you judge whether it’s right? Subjectively? In a customer focus group? Against a checklist of requirements?

2. Colours
   As with your logo, what parameters are in place to judge which colours are right? Have you done competitor analysis? How much do you want to stand out? How much do you want to fit in?

3. Typography
   This is often where many client’s eyes start to glaze over. If you’ve spent your career in financial services or healthcare, you may never previously have been asked for your opinion on a ligature or a sans serif, or ever debated the relative merits of Garamond and Caslon. So how will you know you’re getting this part right?

4. Imagery
   Should your brand’s imagery be optimistic and human, or subtle and abstract? Illustrative or photographic? Bold and challenging or soothing and reassuring? Will you need to see all the options to know what’s right?

5. Brand voice
   In our opinion this should be number 1, not number 5. But all too often, organisations’ checklist follow 1-4 and and stop there. However, thinking about your brand voice first, gives you the answers to most of the other questions. If you’ve uncovered and articulated the personality at the heart of your brand, it’s much easier to brief a designer to create a logo, colours, typography and imagery that expresses it. And much less of a moving target for them to aim at.

You might know what you need, but do you know what you need to budget?

Before you brief anyone to create or update your brand, do you have an idea of what you’re happy to spend? The truth is that you could spend anywhere between a few hundred and few hundred thousand pounds, depending on who you brief and how long and complicated the process turns out to be.

How much does branding cost,
is a different question to
how much can branding cost

Across the marketing and design industries, the average agency hourly rate is £97, while more expensive companies will charge £131/hr for junior people and up to £310/hr for their director’s time. So you can see how costs could very quickly rack up.

Alternatively, you could go cheap and cheerful and get a local designer to knock you something out for a grand or so.

But remember, you’re going to have to live with the result for a long time. It’s your public face, your calling card, your identity. So it has to be worth taking seriously, if not crazily expensively.

At Brand Voice Agency, we try to position our costs somewhere between the two extremes.

That’s why we think it’s useful to offer flat fees on certain projects, and to discuss client budgets in an atmosphere of collaboration and transparency.

If you know you can only afford £3,000, tell us. It’s a small budget and less than we’d advise most organisations to set aside. But not every company is the same size or at the same stage. We’ve helped clients like this, and we’re yet to turn anyone away (after all, we see trusted relationships as an investment in our own company’s future).

We’ve costed our Core Services on a flat fee basis, so you can develop your brand voice for as little as £2,500. Once you have this fundamental building block in place, design elements can be created far less painfully and expensively. After all, a designer with a clearly defined and tight brief is going to charge many fewer hours than one who’s given woolly, open-ended direction.

Brand Voice Agency are able to help prevent other costs mounting up exponentially. We can provide every kind of service to express your brand from logo, colours, typography and imagery to web build, videography, photography, website copy, advertising, blogging, social media etc., etc. We’re happy to change for these services in any number of ways, from hourly/daily/weekly/monthly fees to pre-agreed, all-in flat costs.

In our view the best way to answer the question, “How much does branding cost?” is through dialogue, collaboration, and trusted relationships. The honest answer is that it could cost pretty much anything. But talking to a partner you trust in a spirit of honesty and teamwork is the best way to find a solution that suits you, not only in terms of the quality of the outcome, but the level of investment you can justify.

We’ve helped every kind of brand, from those needing a sensitive approach to men’s health, to those needing to add humanity to management consultancy.
Talk to Brand Voice Agency today, to uncover your distinctive brand voice. Email contact@brandvoice.agency

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We’re often asked who needs a brand voice agency. In other words, what kind of clients come to us for help?
Well, every kind actually. But three sorts in particular.

Three types of client who need a brand voice agency

1. Startups looking for funding
   We say it until we’re blue in the face: “The investor pitch is the customer pitch is the investor pitch”. In other words, the best way to engage investors is to present what your eventual customer will see. Show them the excitement and vision of your brand. Sure, there’s going to be a lot of money talk. But the best way to persuade an investor to part with some is to first get them excited about your brand.
   That’s why we work with a lot of startups to help them distill the essence of their offering into something snappy, memorable and motivating. Get the words right, and it gives a designer more of a target to shoot at. Startups who start with brand voice, end up with investor pitch decks that are much more considered, persuasive, and slick.

2. Startups with funding, ready to launch
   A lot of clients come to us once they’ve raised funds and are ready to launch themselves into the market, usually starting with a website. We help them uncover an organising thought that can either inform design. Or if design already exists, add brand language to it, that makes the design more effective. Once we’ve done the groundwork of creating the brand voice, writing any kind of communication from the website, to social posts, to advertising is much easier.

3. Established brands at an inflection point
   The clients with the most demanding projects tend to be the most established. Very often they’ve been around for five or 10 years. And usually, the impetus to reconsider their brand (and brand voice) is being driven by a new hiring, for example the arrival of a CMO. Other times, the existing management of an organisation has decided that it may be time to professionalise their public face.
   In these cases, we tend to find that the brand has grown like a house without planning permission, with a shed tacked on here, a wonky loft extension there, and an unsightly granny flat added round the back. Our job is then to help the company rationalise where they’ve got to and why, and what elements are worth taking forward. These kinds of clients tend to have a little more time to think about their direction than the other two sorts. And of course, better budgets too. At the same time, it can be challenging to unlearn old habits, and a lot of our effort is focused on stakeholder engagement. Listening to the different views around the organisation to ensure everyone has an opportunity to contribute.

Whichever kind of company you are, and even if you match none of the stereotypes outlined here, we can help you refine your core offering, and provide you with a brand voice that expresses your distinctiveness. To answer the question, ‘who needs a brand voice agency?’ we’d respectfully suggest the answer is EVERYONE.

We’ve helped every kind of brand, from those needing a sensitive approach to men’s health, to those needing to add humanity to management consultancy.
Talk to Brand Voice Agency today, to uncover your distinctive brand voice. Email contact@brandvoice.agency

What makes your brand voice? Is it a certain tone? A focus on particular topics? A distinctive way of phrasing your services? It’s all of these things, and more. Try our failsafe recipe to create your own delicious brand language.

Your recipe for a distinctive brand voice

• Start by warming a large pan of research
  Who are you? Who are your competitors? What are they saying? How are you similar? How are you different? How do your key stakeholders write and present?

• Mix raw ingredients into an organising idea
  Taking what you’ve learnt about your brand’s points of difference, personality and attitude, uncover an organising idea that sits at the core of your brand. What we’re looking for is a simple but inspiring sentence that you can build on.

• Stir into a stock of phrases
  At this point, it’s useful to flesh out your organising idea into a few paragraphs of text. Some call this a manifesto, others a brand story. In any case, what you’re aiming to create is a ‘treasury’ of words and phrases. Agreed ways of talking about your brand, service, and products, that you can dip in and out of, whatever you’re writing.

• Chop into snappy lines
  Now that you have an organising idea and long-form voice, it’s useful to create some pithier expressions of it, in the form of headlines that can be used in advertising, webpages, email subjects, or anything else you need. We find these are often the best way to bring to life a distinctive tone. Write loads and see what feels right and what doesn’t. 

• Sprinkle adjectives
  Now, stand back and see what it all adds up to. How would you describe the tone that’s emerged? Try and be original (everyone says ‘professional’, ‘approachable’, ‘friendly’). less familiar words like ‘zesty’ or ‘affectionate’ can really stand out, and inspire you to remember what makes your brand different.
  

• Serve with a “do and don’t” list
  What you don’t say is almost as important as what you do say. So think about those industry or sector clichés like “solutions”, “thinking outside the box”, “state of the art” etc. How can you say them in your own voice? How can you stand out in a world where so much language washes over you in a generic tide?

• Get the best people in the ‘kitchen’
  Probably the most reliable way to develop a successful brand voice is to choose the best people to help you create it. Brand Voice Agency are skilled in getting under the skin of a brand very quickly, and working in a collaborative way to help you uncover your distinctive tone and language as painlessly as possible.

We’ve helped every kind of brand, from those needing a sensitive approach to men’s health, to those needing to add humanity to management consultancy.
Talk to Brand Voice Agency today, to uncover your distinctive brand voice. Email contact@brandvoice.agency

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Here are 10 reasons why you need to take your brand voice seriously. After all, Everything you say or write on behalf of your organisation adds up to your brand voice. You may not have planned it, but by default or design, it exists. However, the chances are, that unless you’ve seriously thought about it (ideally with some expert external help) it will be inconsistent and lack the distinctiveness every brand needs to succeed.

See ‘Why do you need a manifesto’

Top 10 reasons why you need a brand voice:

1. To join up all your comms channels into one consistent personality
   If you speak one way on your website, another way on LinkedIn and use another style again on your social channels, customers or clients who read more than one will be confused. Are you informal or traditional, snappy or flowery, hard sell or seductive, humorous or earnest? If the answer is ‘it depends who wrote it’, you have a problem.

2. To stand out against your competitors
   In every industry the market leader tends to set the tone. Their challengers often fall into the trap of thinking that sounding the same is the only way to be seen as legitimate and trustworthy. But the opposite is true. What can you do to provide a recognisable alternative?

3. To avoid making generic statements
   In most markets the same stock phrases come up time after time. Everybody’s ‘celebrating success’, being ‘solutions oriented’, and committing themselves to being ‘sustainabily-focused’. Yadda, yadda. The question is, what makes you different? And if you don’t sound it, are you really?
   

4. To find original ways to say familiar things
   Of course, sometimes there are ‘hygiene’ factors and must-haves that you need to cover to provide reassurance. But that shouldn’t mean pasting it in from a competitor. Every sentence you write or publish is an opportunity to be memorable.

5. To maximise your spend and avoid splintered and ineffective messaging
   Good websites don’t come cheap (sadly, nor do bad ones). Advertising costs a pretty packet too. So what’s the point in spending company money on a style of messaging in one channel, if it’s not reflected in the others? Why run a social media campaign that links to a website that looks and sounds totally different? Or  relaunch your website without updating your LinkedIn page? 
   

6. To remind yourselves what makes you special and different
   Even the most senior and long-serving people in an organisation can forget what makes their brand special. The day-to-day can take over, allowing tactical considerations to submerge any idea of an overarching narrative. A strong brand voice ensures you know who you are, new recruits do, and so do people who interview for roles at every level from the C-suite to the suite cleaners.
   

7. To remind clients or customers why you’re special and different
   Most importantly, a strong brand voice ensures clients and customers both existing and new, know who you are and feel they’ve made a distinct choice that’s right for them.

8. To simplify your offering into easily communicable human terms
   Emotion is a word we use a lot to Brand Voice Agency. Especially to clients who work in fields where they imagine everything they do is rational. Humans aren’t like that, and whether they’re choosing cereal, or Exchange Traded Funds, they’re ultimately guided by their gut. Your brand voice helps you speak to them, human-to-human.
   

9. To stand for something
   At the heart of every distinctive brand voice is an organising thought. Once you’ve uncovered that, your brand voice flows naturally from it.

10. To avoid standing for just anything
    As the saying goes, ‘if you don’t stand for something, you’ll stand for anything’. Your brand voice helps you remain distinctive at all times and create affinity with a loyal core of customers. You can’t be everything to everybody, but the aim is to be the perfect fit for enough people to make your brand a consistent success.

We’ve helped every kind of brand, from those needing a sensitive approach to men’s health, to those needing to add humanity to management consultancy.
Talk to Brand Voice Agency today, to uncover your distinctive brand voice. Email contact@brandvoice.agency

𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄. That’s not a defence of nepotism or elitism but an offer of help. Brand Voice Agency are here to make your life easier by providing range of services to communicate your brand to customers, easily, inexpensively, and at the highest quality.

🎤Brand voice strategy and guidelines? Tick (naturally).

✍️Copy? Tick.

🎨Design? Tick.

But also:

👩🏽‍💻Web development

🔍 SEO

🎬Video shooting and editing

📸 Photography

☎️Media planning and buying

👍🏻Display and social banner production

📧Email strategy and delivery

Whether you’re in a marketing role in a client company or an agency, you can turn on any or all of these range of services to communicate your brand to customers whenever you need them. And even better, turn them off again when you don’t.

All our partners have long established, trusted relationships with Brand Voice Agency. In short, we’ve found the right people, so you don’t have to. It’s the result of our Founder having spent a long career in the marketing and advertising industry. Graham‘s book of contacts is enviable and he can assemble just the right bespoke team for pretty much any project within days or even hours. We only use grownups who get it, which means we offer solutions that are better quality, based on greater experience, and that we thus produce faster. We believe the right work comes out of having the right conversations. That’s why we make ourselves readily available via phone, email, Slack, Zoom, Teams, Google Meet – whatever suits you.

So if you need a new website, some advertising, a deep dive into your strategic positioning, or just a video to capture an event, give us a shout.

It’s not what you know but who you know – especially when you know people who know what you don’t.

𝘾𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙖𝙫𝙖𝙡𝙧𝙮: www.brandvoice.agency

LI 15-10-23

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Why scrape the internet
when you can scrape our experience?

At Brand Voice Agency we believe that you should trust real intelligence not AI. AI is brilliant in some instances. I like spam filters. I love that my car nudges me when I stray over the white line.
Google is pretty handy, too.

So, on the surface, AI generated content sounds like a great idea. Instant content for free. What’s not to like?

Problem is, where does AI generated content come from? You might save time. You’ll certainly save money. But you may also lose sleep.

How do you know your copy content is accurate? How do you know it hasn’t plagiarised someone else’s work? After all, it had to come from somewhere.
How do you know a lawyer’s letter isn’t already on its way?

On the other hand, Brand Voice Agency offers highly experienced creative people who will come up with completely original concepts, copy and design.
The only prompt you need is a briefing session.

Once we get to work, we don’t scour the internet but our influences. We don’t scrape other people’s sites, but our own imagination. And we don’t base our solutions on what’s already out there, but on our experience of what works.

When it comes to your brand and how it’s communicated, trust real intelligence not AI. Because real intelligence is much more reassuring than the Artificial kind.

Main image Alexandra Koch

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Announcing our partnership with Paragon PR

Brand Voice Agency and  Paragon PR have agreed a partnership to benefit both our client rosters.

Paragon are experts in getting their clients into “conversations that matter”. Established in 2012, the agency has offices in London, New York and Colorado, servicing financial, fintech, crypto, emerging technology, and other forward-looking firms. Paragon takes a messaging-led route to building strong, sustainable and results-focused brands. Their clients include the identity and risk management experts FastPath, the regulatory compliance platform Star Compliance, the trading platform Millennium, and the blockchain pioneers, XDC Network. Brand Voice Agency’s founder, Graham Pugh has a long established relationship with Paragon, having worked for them part-time as a Brand Strategist since 2021. This ensures that the partnership is built on personal trust and an established working relationship.

The partnership means we can introduce Brand Voice Agency clients to a rich and award-winning level of PR service, provided by Paragon’s extremely skilled and respected teams in both the US and London. Paragon is a repository of in-depth knowledge of financial services and fintech, as well as proven PR techniques honed over many decades. Whether you’re in financial services, fintech or professional services, you can connect to added scale and depth of support, and enjoy seamless access to the US market.

Meanwhile, Brand Voice Agency perfectly complements Paragon by providing a raft of services including:

💡   Advertising and social media concepts

✍️  Copy

🎨   Design

👩🏽‍💻   Web development

🎬   Video shooting and editing

☎️   Media planning and buying

👍🏻   Display and social banner production

📧   Email strategy and delivery

📸    Photography

It all adds up to a reassuring combination of experience, expertise, scale and reach that marks an exciting new chapter for both agencies.

Find out more about Paragon PR

Brand Voice Agency’s Full Service offering

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