How much does branding cost?

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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