One of my regular vendors changed their logo recently. We give their salesguy flak all the time about the their trendy “square of quality”. I liked their old one better.
We ridiculed Lucent for their coffee ring, too.
“Gee - bet you paid a half million for a blue square”, we joke.
But really, if I were a big corp, how much would I pay some marketing/design firm for a new logo?
Depends on how big.
I suspect that the greatest portion of the cost is ensuring the new design isn’t too close to an existing one that will get you sued.
When Qantas changed their logo last year it cost them an estimated AU$100m. Rebranding is more than just designing a nifty new graphic.
As someone said, it really depends how big the company is. But let’s say it’s Fortune 500. And let’s assume all the preliminary work—new positioning, competitive exploratition is done. Such a company could expect to pay a good design firm anywhere from $75,000 to 2,000,000+. That is a lot of money, and mostly reflects time of endless revisions and tweaks and meetings and meetings. This is mainly because companies so oftne do it wrong and allow lower levels to carry forth the project, with upper management signing off. And guess, what happens? The upper levels don’t agree with the thinking of the lower tiers, so it’s back to the drawing board. And then there’s letterhead, signage, and other corporate ID. Which, as another poster mentioned, can really cost a butt-load as far as implementation.
The greatest cost is changing all the signs, books, stationary, business cards, etc.
As to design. the City of Stockton hired a consultant for $20,000, eight to ten years ago. What they got wasn’t just a concept, it was also a big manual of logo usage. There were stationery templates and business card templates and side of truck templates. There were examples of the logo above or next to the words ‘City of Stockton’, either in color or black and white, with or without the All American City Logo. I didn’t read through the whole thing, but you could tell that a lot of time had gone into just making the report. It was a significant thing to lift.
The report and examples were also provided in various electronic versions, so that they could be disbursed to all departments and emailed to outside consultants and contractors. So you’re not only paying for the design. I wasn’t in the loop, but I bet magellan01 is totally right about the meetings and revisions. I’m sure big corporations would also want marketing studies done, so that they had documentation that The Public, or at least their identified share of it, responded positively to the new logo.
For what it’s worth:
Towards the end of his career in the mid-90s, Paul Rand, the designer of the IBM, NeXT, and classic UPS logos (among many others), was asking $100,000 per logo.
And you can still end up spending $800,000 on a logo that almost everyone hates, as the 2012 London Olympic Organising Committee found out last year.
My favorite rebranding story is about all the time and money that USAir spent in order to decide to become U.S. Airways, which was already on their corporate charter. And USAir loved it. Those consultants were geniuses.
Yeah but I bet that cost includes changing all the signage, stationery, website, aircraft and vehicle liveries, comapny ID cards, etc etc etc.
The actual cost of designing the logo would have been nothing like that much.
I’ve got the quickie version of my employer’s branding book here, and it’s about two inches thick. A staggering amount of work goes into this stuff - there are specs for proportions, page placement, typefaces to be used in advertising and corporate communications, specific ink colors to be used on specific paper types (down to absurdities like Pantone 123U Red on uncoated stock and Pantone 123aC Red on coated stock), things the logo should not be used on (paper plates, napkins) and even a whole subset of how to treat the logo if the printing is black and white or if the printing process can’t accommodate a “bleed” off the edge of paper. Naturally, another whole chapter is devoted to Web presence and another for video (TV ads, PowerPoint presentations, etc.)
Then, if you want to use this info, you have to attend branding school. I tells ya, this has to cost a small fortune to develop and maintain.
True, you have a point.
But it’s no good having a nice shiny new logo graphic if you don’t stick it on everything.
True, but for pricier things, or peripheral things, you can just replace with the new logo as things wear out and are replaced. Sometimes. With some businesses/agencies.
In addition to the branding vs just logo above, a lot of it depends on your reputation. In the 80s I was a nobody designer in Dallas. I charged a flat rate of $3,000.00 per logo. Mind you this was for just the logo - not branding. I had a good friend in the industry who charged 3x that much. As mentioned corporate firms can charge into the millions.
Speaking of reputations and such, I’ve heard that Mossilmo Vognelli only uses 3 or 4 typefaces ever.
And then the company contracts with some doofus (like me), who totally ignores it.
I do a lot of PCB layout work for Freescale (a spinoff of Motorola). The Freescale engineers will usually ask me to put the logo on the board, but they can’t supply it an any useful format, and if there’s a specification in the style manual for “PCB”, they don’t know it, and I certainly don’t. So, I just scan any logo I have handy, scale it, and stick in somewhere on the board that it fits. Nobody seems to care (the style nazis probably never see these boards, although they are often distributed to the public).
I suspect that a lot of time and money goes into the above that the average person wouldn’t know about, too. I’m in HR outsourcing (technology manager) - every time one of our clients changes their logo or name (which we put on our programmed forms going to the participant, one off manual forms to the same, preprinted envelope supply, web site, presentations, third party work by our consultants, etc. etc. etc.), it’s a big deal. And we ain’t cheap.
I had one client decide to keep their old name on all of our stuff for the year left on their contract, instead of paying our quoted price to change to their new post-merger name.
Back in the early 80s I read a report about an experiment the United Way performed concerning the quality of the paper used in their direct mail donation mailings. The study verified that an upgrade in the quality of paper increased the number and amount of donations—by a significant amount.
This won’t surprise many of us here today. We take it for granted that better paper presents a classier presentation and that, in turn, brings greater success. We are much more sophisticated these days in our understanding of sales techniques, marketing concepts and the newest kid on the block: branding.
These days even a small charity with a tiny budget now knows how important graphics and presentation are to the success of their enterprise.
If you want a sweater in a catalog to look like the sweater that’s going to be delivered, you better understand that coated and uncoated stock render colors very differently.
Quality and consistency is important to major businesses and they do the best they can in every aspect of their business. They wouldn’t spend so much time, effort and money on these things, if they were not very important.
Although logos in and of themselves aren’t so hellaciously expensive, market testing and further research and deliberation to be sure that the new logo is both an improvement and the message you want to send about your organization can certainly be.
You might be able to get some graphic design student to make you the coolest logo in the entire world for $100 and an hour of work, but the research to support that decision isn’t nearly so cheap or easy.
Also, when looking for a new logo, a company will pay a number of designers for a number of ideas initially. This will be narrowed down to a shortlist. Then maybe two with full branding programs, then a final selection.
All this costs money from smart people. It ticks me off when someone (usually a tabloid newspaper) complains that XCorp (or even better, GovDeptX) paid £Y (a large figure) to get a new logo that looks like a kids kindergarten squiggle.
I’d like to see the tabloid hand it’s own rebranding to a bunch of preschoolers paid with sweets. Or even a bunch of college students. I can guarantee that they would not even consider it.
Graphic design is a serious skill. And to make a logo simple and recognisable and useful is a tough job that needs to be well rewarded.
Oh, and the consummate professionalism required to sneak a picture of a man holding his penis onto the letterhead of the Office of Government Commerce is stunning. 
Si
Hello there, brand designer checking in…
For starters, it’s NEVER ‘just’ a logo. A logo is just one itty bitty part of the wider visual identity, so when you hire a brand agency, you’ll get
And it goes on.
It can take six months to a year to produce, on average, and would probably cost, depending on the size of your organisation, anything from $100k-$2m in design fees alone, so that’s excluding any print/production costs. Add the cost of changing all your stuff (and if you’re talking about an organisation like BP, that’s a LOT and they’ll want to do it pretty much all in one go) and you’re talking millions.
If the fees seem a lot, then imagine a team of 5-10 people working on virtually nothing else for six months. Changing a brand can be a LOT of work.
However, if you’re a little restaurant round the corner, and want a brand that will just apply to signage, menus and a website, then design fees would probably be $20k ish.
(I should add that these vague numbers have been translated in my head from £ to $. I don’t know what US agencies would charge).
I agree.
The shit really hits the tabloid fan when the BBC spends some money on their idents. They spend considerably less than the major commercial channels and Channel 4, but they still catch a lot of stick.
