Ask an agency what a brand project costs and the standard answer is “it depends”, followed by an invitation to a scoping call. It does depend. It is also the least helpful true sentence in the industry. Ranges exist, every agency knows theirs, and considering this series is called Brand, Honestly we thought we should share ours, so here they are.
The numbers
Strategy comes first and is priced by depth. A one-day strategy sprint is around 12K, the best fit for startups and early-stage businesses. Our Brand Bullseye workshop, a day and a half focused on positioning and communications, is around 20K. The full version, two and a half days, which also aligns your people and culture with the strategy, is around 25K.
The appearance system, the identity built from that strategy, is around 25K, scaling with the size of the job.
Then rollout, which varies the most. Websites run from 15K to 30K and beyond depending on scale. Collateral programs start around 10K. Campaigns, content and video are scoped to the job.
A meaningful engagement, strategy, plus the appearance system, generally starts at 30K to 40K, and larger programs go well past that. So if you have been wondering whether this is a 10K conversation or a 100K one, the answer is that both exist, and most of our clients sit between the two.
What moves the number
Deliverables are the wrong place to look for the price. What moves the number is the level of the problem being solved.
A logo refresh for a business whose strategy is settled and working is a small problem. The same deliverables attached to a repositioning, a business moving up a weight class to compete with bigger players for bigger contracts, are a larger problem wearing the same deliverables sometimes. The stakes are higher, the thinking required is deeper, the cost of getting it wrong is greater, and the price follows the problem rather than the final pieces of artwork.
The other mover is input. Larger businesses carry more of it: more stakeholders, more layers of approval, more rounds before a decision holds. The previous article made the case for having everyone with influence in the room, and the bigger that room has to be, the longer the work takes.
This is also why comparing agency quotes line by line misleads. Two quotes listing the same deliverables can describe entirely different jobs, and the cheaper one is frequently quoting for a smaller problem than the one you have. The protection is simple: be completely clear on the problem your agency is solving, and on how its fees are structured to achieve the outcomes it has stated.
What the cheap option does afterwards
We can tell you how the cheap option plays out, because we are often the second agency.
A business buys the 5K identity. On day one it looks fine. Then the website copy has to be written, and there is nothing underneath the identity to write from, so the words come out generic, or AI writes something that sounds nice. The sales deck gets rebuilt by whoever needs it next, each version drifting a little further. Eighteen months in, the team has stopped using half of it, the founder is embarrassed by the website again, and the project that should have happened in the first place happens anyway, now with the original spend gone and a market that has met two versions of the company and is about to meet a third.
The cheap option is rarely bought once. By the end of that story, the business has paid for its brand twice, if it’s around long enough.
Reading the price against the cost
The second article in this series put arithmetic against a brand that has stopped working: the extra meetings before you are believed, the margin conceded at the end of deals, the proposals written for people who were never going to buy. For an established business, that figure is commonly bigger than the cost of fixing the real cause in the first place, and it repeats every year the cause stays unfixed. And even that figure is false, because it leaves out the business you missed out on. The enquiries that never came are not in anyone’s count, and they are usually the biggest cost of all.
That is the frame we would put around the ranges above. A 30K project set against a problem costing 50K a year is cheap. The same project set against no problem at all is expensive. Which is why the first two articles in this series matter more than this one, and why we would rather you read them first.
If you want a number for your situation
We run a paid diagnostic for exactly this: 2K, credited against the strategy fee if a project goes ahead. You get an honest read on whether you have a problem worth 30K of fixing, and both of us find out early whether we should be talking. Email Dean if you want a diagnostic.
And if you would rather spend nothing yet, go back to the one-sentence test in the first article. It is free, and it tells you most of what you need to know; write the one sentence you want a prospect to believe about your business, then ask three people around you to say it back.
Next in Brand, Honestly: what you can fix without an agency.
