Before you rebrand, read this...

Brands can be incredibly powerful. A swoosh. Golden arches. A piece of fruit with a bite missing. The 'da-dun' before you watch a new show. Each of these immediately recognisable signals carries immense weight, value, and influence.

At the other end of the spectrum, brands can be incredibly painful. And if you're reading this, you likely know the symptoms.

Hellish whack-a-mole games managing different combinations of aesthetics and messaging. Subpar quality, with teams going rogue and 'experimenting' with brand conventions. The bone-chilling experience of spotting something out in the wild—an email, a social post, a display ad, a presentation—which makes you shudder, and that you never even knew existed. Confusing brand architectures. The list goes on.

These issues need fixing. Unchecked, they have significant accumulative impact on your commercial performance. And a rebrand might seem like the logical solution.

Here's the thing: these are brand governance issues, not brand identity problems. So it might be worth pausing to consider your options. And the general relevance of a rebrand.

In the right circumstances, a rebrand can deliver enormous value. But in the wrong circumstances, a rebrand can be an expensive aesthetic band-aid for issues caused by mechanical management and process: like painting your car when the engine is busted.

So, before you rebrand, let's run through the costs and risks associated with this type of work. And highlight some alternative approaches to hedge against risk.

The direct, hard costs of a rebrand.

These are costs paid to external suppliers. Right off the bat, finding and onboarding those suppliers can be a huge effort unto itself.

A procurement process for a mid-to-large rebrand project would usually involve selecting a vendor to deliver:

• Full brand strategy and identity redevelopment
• Brand architecture review (if necessary)
• Design system and templates
• Marketing asset overhaul
• Website design and redevelopment
• Experience or retail brand recommendations
• Internal brand engagement work

The overwhelming cost of getting underway

First up, before you can get into any of the deliverables, you'll need to run a process of discovery and brief development. This might involve a review of the current brand performance and pain points; an audit of your current assets; internal stakeholder engagement to define goals, constraints and timelines; and presentations to establish executive level endorsement. This could take anywhere from 20-80 hours from senior internal team members. There could also be an external cost associated with procurement consultants.

Step two is a market scan to determine your prospective vendors. Here, you'll identify a list of agencies or studios; you'll research their capability; you might conduct some initial briefing calls to determine fit or rapport; you might check their credentials. Then you'll present the options internally for alignment and validation. This could take 10-30 hours from senior internal team members.

Step three might involve issuing a Request for Information. The prospective agencies submit high level credentials and an outline of their approach. You'll assesses fit, scale and capability, and create a refined shortlist. This could take 20-40 hours from senior internal team members.

Step four is the main event, issuing the Request for Proposal and managing the subsequent responses. Agencies will submit their full long-form response, outlining scope, process, team, budget, capabilities, differentiators, and more. There are potentially workshops, pitch presentations, and Q&As. Scoring is weighted against a set of criteria, before a preferred vendor is chosen. This could take 40-120 hours from senior internal team members, and may involve some external procurement support.

Step five is negotiating and contracting, where you might back-and-forth over scope, price, risk and indemnity review, and executive sign-off. This could take 40-80 hours from senior internal team members.

Lastly, you'll typically onboard the winner through some sort of kick-off process (which they might drive, depending on the agency you select). This usually involves some consultation and collaborative discussions to outline project governance, file management, planning, and more. This could take 20-40 hours from senior internal team members.

To start the rebrand project, you've already invested between 90 and 390 hours from senior internal team members, from a range of teams and skillsets spanning:

• Marketing
• Procurement
• Legal
• Executive

Keep in mind, this doesn't factor for any external procurement or legal support that may be required.

…and then, the work begins

Now you're paying for the actual rebrand project itself—this is the fun bit.

It's worth noting many of these are 'replacement costs': they don't create any additional customer value and may take time to generate any form of tangible return on investment.

There are many variables that will affect the cost of a rebrand project. And, equally, as many different ways to define and deliver one.

The following ranges are referenced from Frontify's article 'A complete breakdown of rebranding costs in 2025'. You can find more detail around each of these deliverable and pricing tiers in the article, but for reference:

1. Brand strategy and research.

This involves work to understand market gaps, value propositions, and customer preferences. It may consist of activities like stakeholder interviews, audience segmentation, competitor analysis, and comparative benchmarking.

• Lean/Low budget: $1,000 - $5,000
• Mid-Range: $5,000 - $10,000
• High-End/Large Scale: $50,000 - $150,000+

2. Visual identity and design costs.

This will include development of design elements like logos, typography, colour palette, and applications for signage or products.

• Lean/Low budget: $5,000 - $15,000
• Mid-Range: $15,000 - $50,000
• High-End/Large Scale: $150,000 - $300,000+

3. Brand guidelines and documentation.

To make the rebrand effective, guidelines should be scalable, easy to find and access, and straightforward to follow. These costs will depend on the format and functionality of your approach, as well as the scale of the rollout.

• Lean/Low budget: $1,000 - $5,000
• Mid-Range: $5,000 - $15,000
• High-End/Platform-facilitated: $15,000+, plus $20,000 - $50,000 annually

4. Marketing and communication materials.

These are the most visible proof-points of your rebrand, and what most people think of when it comes to these projects. This involves updating collateral and assets like brochures, social media templates and profiles, sales decks, campaign creative, packaging and signage, and more.

• Lean/Low budget: $5,000 - $10,000
• Mid-Range: $10,000 - $50,000
• High-End/Large Scale: $100,000 - $500,000

The hidden operational (and opportunity) costs you may not account for.

Congratulations, you've now completed your rebrand project, represented in the costs outlined above.

These assets are often beautifully crafted. But they're also often created in a vacuum. They're usually a high-level introduction to applications and open to interpretation: the equivalent of a series of chords you're taught before being told to play a song on stage minutes later.

In more literal terms, they're usually a series of guidelines handed from a branding agency to marketing teams, internal stakeholders, other agencies, and various vendors with an implied message: "follow this, forever".

It's perfect in principle. Except the world doesn't work this way.

The brand that lives within these guidelines—in a ring-bound folder or sleek presentation slides—is not the real brand.

The real brand exists out in the wild, in the myriad other touchpoints that are not glamorous enough to make it into a deck. In email signatures, social posts, new campaign landing pages, presentations, store wayfinding signage, customer support scripts.

The broader roll out is left to your broader team, and this is where additional costs and leakage can occur.

The cost of config and confusion

When it comes to broader rollout and implementation, you can lose additional revenue though:

• Hours spent internally updating documents and assets not covered by the initial branding project
• Time lost navigating and interpreting new brand systems, templates, rules, conventions
• Delays in delivering campaigns or initiatives while teams transition over to the new brand
• Rework caused by confusion or misapplied branding
• Management time necessitated by reviews, approvals bottlenecks, and rollout decisions

These hours don't appear anywhere on the brand project budget, but your organisation pays for them through lost productivity or opportunity cost.

What other, value or revenue-generating activities could these hours be spent accomplishing? The answer to that question leads to yet another potential cost:

The cost of lost opportunity and diverted attention

A rebrand and the associated rollout can pull attention and investment away from initiatives that do drive tangible commercial value. This could include lost progress in:

• Product and service innovation
• Improvement to customer experience
• Sales and business development activity
• Improvement of governance and existing workflows/process

A rebranding project has the potential to divert attention away from the 'new', but it can also create wastage by making your existing assets and collateral outdated. Depending on your organisation, that's when you'll experience…

The cost of wastage through outdated inventory

Depending on the scale of your project, a rebrand can mean legacy collateral is no longer relevant or reflective of your brand.

That includes things like:

• Outdated packaging
• Printed brochures, flyers, or onboarding materials
• Uniforms and livery
• Physical and wayfinding signage

The potential costs no one wants to acknowledge: what if this doesn't work at all?

See that hulking grey mass over in the corner? That's the elephant in the room. What if, after all this effort and expenditure, the rebrand project doesn't solve your issues?

This is a real and genuine risk.

Brand equity impairment is acknowledged under ISO 10668, the globally recognised framework that defines how to measure the monetary value of a brand in a transparent, consistent, and objectively defensible way.

A rebrand project is not a golden ticket to a guaranteed promised land.

If your brand already has high levels of awareness, strong recall, and high brand trust, there's a real risk that an ineffective rebrand project completely resets your equity instead of building on it.

In other words:

You might spend a huge amount to ultimately weaken your brand: a balance-sheet asset that took years of effort and investment to build.

What's the alternative? Brand-as-product: a flexible, testable, and cost-effective approach.

A large brand refresh project is avoidable if brand consistency is kept in check, and brands can flex over time instead of rebuilding or renovating every 7-10 years.

Brand-as-product means treating your brand like a digital product. It involves a process of continual testing, refinement, iterative evolution, and upgrading. This approach mitigates the cycle of decay and renewal associated with major rebrand projects, ensuring brands maintain relevance, salience, distinctiveness, and creative integrity over time.

We're currently in the process of building the perfect brand-as-product toolkit, which includes:

• OnBrand: the instant, automated brand checker, which you can express your interest to test via a free pilot now.
• BrandHQ: eliminate brand mess with a single user interface, and an assistant to help with all things brand related. No more searching through email chains, servers, folder, or multiple websites for brand assets.
• BrandIQ: 'Where's the most recent logo I should use in print applications?' 'What acceptable imagery do we have for this product?' The AI-powered chatbot helpdesk for all brand-related questions.
• And more…

A major rebrand comes with substantial cost, significant risk, and no guarantee of success.

For a fraction of the cost—and with a brand-as-project approach—you can strengthen what you already have, solidify brand governance, improve consistency, accelerate marketing, and deliver measurable return-on-investment within 12 months.

And, if the brand-as-product approach doesn't fix your issues? You can always reconsider the rebrand. It's a win/win approach, with nothing lost.