What Should You Pay For Branding?

What does branding cost?

This is an important questions for organizations who need branding. Before delving into the question, let’s pause to recall the distinction between price and cost. Price is what branding consultants and agencies will charge you to do the branding work. Cost is the price plus all the time you spend internally on the project plus all the cost of change when you replace all your existing branded material. The focus of this post is on price.

There are of course different budget levels to branding, and they give rise to different approaches. We’ll break it into three levels: budget, expert, and gold-plated.

Branding Project Deliverables
The key activities and deliverables on a quality branding project can be broken into three main categories, which are: brand analysis, brand strategy, and brand systems. The diagram below shows what we here at Distility consider a pragmatic set of deliverables for such projects.

Budget Branding: $1,000 – $20,000
This is the lowest price you can pay to get what many people confuse for a brand – a logo, stationary, website and the like.

Typically, this approach skips the brand analysis step, getting no external research into what’s happening in your market. Then it sees your team rely on their own best instincts when it comes to brand strategy, going without any external help deciding what makes the brand unique, compelling and competitive. When it comes to brand systems, you will likely develop your own brand name, without knowing all the best practices to make that name enduring and protectable.

The money here is spent on work that is outside of your comfort zone: Design. If you are very lucky, you might get a professional result for a couple of hundred bucks using online design contests like 99designs.com. From there the sky is the limit, and it is the norm for organizations to sink what budget they have into these brand systems – rather than the analysis and strategy to ensure design work will actually grow sales.

Once again, beware – these budget prices assigns no value to your own time, which is not only bad branding, it’s bad accounting.

Expert Budget: $20,000 to $90,000
Once you make the commitment to bring in branding experts, and think beyond just logos, things get more interesting. 

Seasoned brand analysis will range from $10,000, which is what having an individual consultant do the job could run you, to $30,000 for an agency. Brand strategy also varies widely, between $10,000 for having a seasoned individual consultant do it to $50,000 for an agency job. When it comes to brand systems, we’re assuming you are letting the experts lead this process too, and that can start at $15,000 and easily climb up to $50,000. There is obviously quite a range in price here, and as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.

Gold-plated branding: $90,000 to $2,000,000
Now take a deep breath and enter the world of the big brand spenders. Here the stakes are high, and the amount of external validation required is substantial, and of course the time frames stretch commensurately. 

The brand analysis portion might already be covered by internal marketing function, which of course doesn’t make them free but at least there isn’t any price for external work to contend with. But if you’re not already tracking everything you need to know about the market and the competition, prices range from $30,000 to $150,000 for a really top flight market research agency.

Brand strategy has a similar price spread: $30,000 from a very seasoned and reputable consultant to $250,000 for a tier 1 global agency.

Brand systems have the widest price spread of them all, because the deliverables can vary wildly too. From a consultant / designer combination or a small agency, you might get a relatively small set of deliverables for as little as $50,000. From the very top agencies, $1,500,000 will get you verbal, visual, digital, office systems and standards documents, plus likely a set of commemorative lucite paperweights, suitable for holding down the branding bill as it sits menacing you from the mahogany inlay of your desk.

The Tip of the Iceberg
The end result is that you can anticipate a very wide range of price for branding projects, from budget to OMG gold-plated special. But it is important to remember that this is just price, the visible tip of the cost iceberg, and it does not address the full cost of branding.