What a Rebrand Actually Costs

What the quote covers

A rebrand quote typically includes a logo, a colour palette, typefaces, and a website.

That is the visible work and it is a genuine piece of work.

It is also, for most small businesses, somewhere between a quarter and a half of what the exercise actually costs.

The rest is replacing every physical and digital thing carrying the old identity, and almost none of it appears in anybody's proposal.

The physical list

• Vehicle wraps or signage, per vehicle.
• Premises signage.
• Uniforms and workwear.
• Business cards and stationery.
• Site boards and safety signage.
• Branded equipment and tools.

Vehicles are the largest single item and the one most often forgotten in a budget. A full wrap on several vans is frequently more than the entire design quote, and a partial application on an existing wrap looks worse than doing nothing.

The digital list

Which is longer and cheaper per item.

The website, the domain, email addresses, and email signatures.

Every listing and directory entry, one at a time.

Social profiles, including the handles, which may not be available.

The invoice and quotation templates in the accounting software.

Any booking system, any customer portal, and any automated message that names the business.

None of those is expensive and together they are two or three days of somebody's time.

The list nobody has

Which is where the surprises come from.

Insurance certificates, trade certifications, prequalification records with commercial clients, supplier accounts, the bank, and anything bonded or licensed.

Sponsorship boards at a sports club, an advertisement in a local publication with a year to run, and a listing in a printed directory.

Product labels, packaging, and anything with a print run still in stock.

Each of those is small and there are twenty of them, and the discovery of each one is a separate small delay.

Building this list before starting is worth more than any other preparation.

A worked example

A three-van service business budgeted eleven thousand for a rebrand, which was the design and website quote.

Vehicle wraps came to nine thousand, uniforms to two, premises signage to three, and printing to one.

Digital changes took four days of somebody's time across two months.

The final figure was a little over twenty-nine thousand, against a quote of eleven.

Nothing had been mis-sold; the quote covered exactly what it said.

The business had assumed the quote was the project.

Phasing changes the number

Which is the main lever available.

Vehicles can be rebranded as they are replaced rather than all at once, which spreads the largest cost over years.

Uniforms can change as they wear out.

Printed material can run down rather than being discarded.

The cost of phasing is a period where both identities are visible, which for a small business is largely invisible to customers and feels worse from the inside than it looks from outside.

Signage, the website, and the digital items should not be phased, since those are what people check.

Everything physical and durable can be.

The cost that is not money

Which belongs in the same assessment.

Somebody has to project-manage thirty items across several months, and in a small business that is the owner.

Search position takes a temporary dip and recovers.

Word of mouth in progress carries the old name for a year or more.

And there is a period where staff answer the telephone with the wrong name, which is ordinary and takes a few weeks.

Budget attention as well as money, since attention is the scarcer of the two.

Ask what the rebrand is for

Which is the question worth asking before any of this.

A name that has become wrong, a partnership change, a legal requirement, or a genuine reposition are all real reasons.

Being bored of the logo is not, and it is a more common motivation than anybody admits.

Where the reason is that the identity looks dated, consider whether refreshing the website and the colours achieves it without touching the name.

That is a fraction of the cost and captures most of the benefit.

Get the quote itemised before agreeing

Which is the practical protection against all of this.

Ask the designer to state plainly what is included, what is excluded, and what file formats you receive at the end.

The exclusions are the useful part, since a proposal listing what it does not cover is effectively handing you the beginning of the budget for everything else.

Ask specifically whether vehicle artwork, signage artwork, and print-ready files for a producer are included, since preparing artwork for each medium is separate work from designing the mark.

A designer who has done this before will answer immediately and will usually volunteer the wider list, which is itself a reason to prefer them.

Decide the date it takes effect

Which sounds administrative and prevents months of drift.

A rebrand without a stated switchover date happens gradually, and gradually means eighteen months of two identities in circulation with nobody sure which to use.

Pick a date, make the website, signage, listings, and documents change on it, and let only the durable physical items lag behind on a stated schedule.

Tell everybody in the business what that date is and what they should say on the telephone from it.

The projects that run over are almost always the ones that never named a day.

The counter-case

Some rebrands are cheap.

A business with no vehicles, no premises signage, no uniforms, and no printed material has only the digital list, which is a few days.

A young business has less accumulated identity to replace and should change early if it is going to.

And a necessary rebrand is worth its cost whatever the figure, since the alternative is trading under a name that is wrong.

List every item carrying the old identity before accepting a quote, phase the durable physical items, and budget roughly three times the design figure.

What to do

1. List every physical item.
2. List every digital one.
3. Add the forgotten list.
4. Price the vehicles first.
5. Phase the durable items.
6. Do not phase the digital ones.
7. Budget three times the quote.

Step four decides whether the project is affordable, since vehicle wraps are frequently larger than the entire design quote and are the item most often left out of the budget.

The design end of this is covered in a logo made in an afternoon.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.