What a rebrand actually costs

Clients ask what a rebrand costs and mean the invoice. The invoice is usually between a fifth and a half of the real number, and it is the only part with a clear owner. Here is the rest of it, written down, because the conversations that go wrong are the ones where this arrives as a surprise in month five.

1. Implementation, which is not design

Repainting vehicles. Reprinting stationery, packaging and forms. Re-badging premises. Replacing embroidered uniform stock. Updating every contract template, every invoice, every regulatory submission with a mark on it. For an organisation with physical assets, this reliably exceeds the design fee — often by a multiple.

It is also the part most easily phased. A well-designed rollout replaces things as they wear out, not on a launch date, and the design system has to be built to tolerate both versions existing for eighteen months.

2. Internal time

Interviews, workshops, reviews, legal checks, trade mark searches, internal comms, training. On a twenty-week programme we typically consume 200 to 400 hours of the client's own people. That time is real, it is usually taken from something else, and it never appears on any budget line.

If you cannot find 200 hours internally, the project will not fail loudly. It will just quietly become ours instead of yours, and you will not recognise it at the end.

3. Licensing, in perpetuity

Typeface licences priced per user and per pageview. Photography with a five-year term. Stock music. Fonts embedded in an app under a licence that did not anticipate an app. We now quote a ten-year licensing projection alongside the fee, because a typeface that costs £1,200 today and £3,400 a year in web licensing is a very different decision.

4. Equity you are choosing to spend

A name people already know is an asset, however ugly the logo is. Changing it spends that asset on the chance of a better one. Sometimes that is obviously correct — after a merger, a scandal, or a genuine change of business. Sometimes a new board simply wants a project with its fingerprints on it, and the honest advice is to keep the name and fix the system underneath.

5. The cost of doing it twice

The most expensive rebrand is the one delivered in eight weeks for a third of the price, which nobody in the organisation believes in, and which is replaced two years later. We have been the second agency on that job four times. It costs more than doing it properly once, and it costs the internal sponsor considerably more than money.

None of which is an argument for a bigger fee. It is an argument for putting the whole number on the table in week one, so the decision being made is the real one.