How Much Does Branding Cost?
We believe that agencies should be 100% transparent about costs. You shouldn’t have to ask why you are being charged for something, or for extra costs to creep into an invoice that you have been sent.
You should already know what’s coming before the bill arrives. And in the spirit of transparency, we’ve put together a rough guide on the costs associated with a rebrand.
Day Rates & Tiered Pricing
It’s very common for agencies to charge based on the time taken to complete a job. It’s easy to understand and a pretty straightforward method. Some agencies charge a ‘blended rate’ which means one flat day rate, whatever they are doing for you.
Otherwise the rate will be tiered based on what type of work is being done. Brand Strategy will almost always be more expensive than straight design work, for example.
Day rates can vary from £150 / €170 a day for a junior freelancer to £1000 / €1150 a day for a high end, reputable design studio.
Value-Based Pricing
Value-based pricing is a very different approach to quoting jobs for clients, and a method that we favour. Instead of starting with a cost for a job, we first ask which elements are most valuable for a client. Once we have made a wishlist with the client, we can then allocate more budget to the most valuable elements.
For example, for a high street shop a logo might be very important as it is seen by hundreds of people a day, but for a B2B consultant maybe less so. Therefore we’d spend more time and budget on a stand-out logo for the shop. For the consultant we may still make a logo, but make something simpler and spend more studio time making a smart brochure that gets handed to every client.
Font Costs
As a branding agency, one of our tasks is to hunt down the perfect font to represent your brand. These come with a price, but there can be quite variable rates depending on which foundry make the font. We tend to factor in around a £200 / €225 budget for fonts per job. If we find the perfect font which blows the budget, we’ll always give the option of a cheaper font and leave the choice up to the client.
Image Licensing
If you need imagery on your website, it’ll need to come from somewhere. There are some good loyalty-free image databases for stock imagery, but these can be quite ubiquitous as lots of people use them. You might see the same images used on another website which doesn’t look great to customers.
Royalty-based stock imagery doesn’t have to be expensive though. It can come in at around £15 / €17 per picture and will give you something a little less prevalent and more original.
Photography
To really own your images, you need to commission a photographer. These vary wildly in price, but ultimately, you do get what you pay for. Rates vary from £150 / €170 to £1000 / €1150 a day. Do your research properly and check the photographers portfolio out first to make sure they can deliver what you need. We use tried, tested and trusted photographers for all our work.
Copywriting
You might also need written content for your website. You may want to do this yourself, but we’d always advise that you enlist a copywriter to either write, or edit your copy.
A good copywriter can make your content on-brand and engaging. Your content is the voice of your company so it’s really important that it is all consistent and uses the same tone of voice. Rates vary from £150 / €170 to £500 / €565 a day, depending on their level of experience.
Collateral and Website Production
Once your rebrand is compete, you’ll need to apply your new branding to all your company assets — both printed and digital. This part of the process is hugely dependent on client requirements. For example, a business card or a website holding page might take a day to design. On the other end of the spectrum, a bells and whistles website can take weeks to design, and weeks to build. All these items are best to individually assess and quote based on requirements.
Ultimately it never makes sense to give a general fixed figure for branding or website design work as all jobs have different requirements, but hopefully that goes some way to outlining the kinds of costs associated with a rebrand. If you would like to get a cost outline, need a formal proposal for a job, or simply require some more details, please feel free to get in touch!
Rog How is co-founder and Managing Director of Polleni branding agency. He studied at the University of Bristol and has worked in radio production for national and international stations in the UK and Australia. Rog has also worked in marketing and audio branding at the BBC alongside agencies such as Fallon and Red Bee. At the BBC Rog led the stakeholder management and radio production of projects such as the Royal Wedding, the Olympics and General Election. Rog co-founded a critically-acclaimed E-Commerce business with his wife Cat How, before selling it to co-found the Pollen Place coworking studios and event space in 2016. Rog co-founded Polleni in 2017 alongside Neil Quinn and Cat How. He is a branding mentor for incubator programs in Lisbon at Beta-i,and speaks regularly at events around Europe. Originally published at polleni.com.
