Ask three agencies to quote a rebrand and you can get three numbers that don’t share a first digit. Usually nobody is fleecing you. The word “rebrand” covers several different jobs, and each agency has quietly assumed a different one.
So this isn’t a price list. I’m not going to publish bands that would be wrong for half the businesses reading them, and neither should anyone else. What I can give you is the structure of the number: what the work is actually made of, which parts blow out, and how to compare two quotes that look nothing alike.
Three different jobs wear the same name
A refresh keeps who you are and modernises how you look. New typography, a tidier colour palette, better templates, a logo that’s been redrawn rather than redesigned. Everything you’ve already printed is still usable for a while. This is the cheapest version by a wide margin and it’s the right answer more often than agencies admit.
A repositioning changes what you say. The name and the mark might survive untouched while the proposition, the audience and the language all move. Most of the budget goes into thinking and writing, not drawing. It’s the version clients underestimate, because there’s so little to look at when it’s finished.
A full rebrand changes both, and sometimes the name too. New identity, new voice, new everything downstream, plus the legal work if the name moves: business name registration, trade marks, domains, and the sinking realisation that the .com.au you want was parked in 2011.
Before you read a single quote, work out which of those three you’re buying. If you can’t say it in one sentence, you’re not ready to be quoted, and the range you get back will reflect that.
The line that’s always bigger than people expect
Design fees are the part everyone braces for. Rollout is the part that gets people.
The website is usually the single largest line item in a rebrand, and it’s frequently larger than the identity work that prompted it. That surprises people, but the arithmetic is straightforward. A new identity implies new page layouts, new photography, new copy across every page, and a build to hold it. When we worked with Revolve Partners, the identity came from another studio and our job was the platform underneath it, and the platform was the bigger piece of work by a distance.
Then count the rest of your surface area. Vehicle wraps. Signage, including the landlord approvals. Uniforms. Packaging, with minimum order quantities that don’t care about your timeline. Email signatures, proposal templates, invoices, the trade show stand, the app icon, the LinkedIn banner, the sponsor board at the local netball club.
A business with two office locations and a service fleet can spend more on physical rollout than on the design that caused it. Nobody tells you this at the pitch, so count your own assets first. A spreadsheet of every surface with your logo on it is the single most useful thing you can bring to a briefing.
What actually drives the number up
Four things, in roughly this order.
The size of the estate comes first. One brand is a project. Four sub-brands under a parent, each needing its own treatment plus a system that holds them together, is a different animal entirely.
Research is next, and it’s the first thing cut when a budget gets tight. Interviews, category analysis and customer work all cost real money. Sometimes cutting it is fine: a founder who talks to customers every day may already hold what the research would tell them. If the last time anyone asked a customer anything was 2019, leave it in.
Then there’s your physical and regulatory footprint. Packaging with compliance labelling, anything sold in a pharmacy or a bottle shop, anything that needs re-approval before it can be printed. Regulated categories add months, and months are money.
The last one is the one no agency will put in writing: how you make decisions. A project with a single decision-maker and a project with a committee of nine are not the same project. Rounds of revision are the real unit of cost in creative work, so if your quote includes two rounds and your organisation needs six, you’ll pay for the other four in money or in delay.
How to compare quotes that look nothing alike
Push every quote into the same shape before you compare them.
Ask what’s actually delivered, file by file. “Brand guidelines” can mean an eight-page PDF or a sixty-page system with worked examples, and both are honest descriptions. Ask how many rounds of revision are included and what happens after that. Ask who owns the working files at the end, and whether the fonts are licensed to you or to the agency. Ask whether copywriting is in or out, because it’s often out, and a new brand voice with no words written in it is half a product.
Then ask what’s explicitly excluded. The good answer is a list. A quote with no exclusions section is a quote that will grow.
When the number is too big
You don’t have to buy it all at once, and staging it is normal.
Do the thinking first, in one go, because a strategy delivered in fragments is worthless. Then the identity core and whatever your customers touch most, which for nearly everyone is the website. Then let the physical assets change on their natural replacement cycle. Vehicles get rewrapped when they’re next serviced. Stationery changes when the box runs out. Signage waits for the lease renewal.
What you shouldn’t do is run two brands at once for years without a plan. That’s the expensive version of saving money, and it teaches your market that you’re unreliable before it teaches them anything else.
When a rebrand is the wrong purchase
Sometimes the brand is fine and the problem is that nobody has heard of it.
Airbnb is the example I keep coming back to. Their shift wasn’t a new logo, it was moving money out of search advertising and into brand marketing, and it took them to over 90% direct traffic. We wrote about what that shift teaches the rest of us. No identity refresh would have produced that outcome, because the identity was never the constraint.
Run the honest test before you spend anything. If customers can describe what you do and simply prefer someone else, a rebrand won’t fix that. If they can’t tell you apart from three competitors, or your business has changed and your brand still describes the old one, that’s the case for a rebrand and it’s a good one.
What “worth it” looks like a year later
Rebrands get judged on whether the leadership team likes the logo, which is the least useful measure available.
Pick better ones before you start, and take a reading now so you have something to compare against. Branded search volume. The share of traffic arriving direct. How long a deal takes to close, and how often you’re asked to discount. Whether new hires say they’d heard of you. None of those move in the first month, and all of them are more honest than a favourable board meeting.
If you’re working out which of the three jobs you’re actually buying, that conversation is the front end of everything we do in creative, and the identity and collateral side lives in design. Bring your asset spreadsheet. It makes the number real much faster than a brief does.
