How to charge for brand strategy
Brand Strategy has the potential to add a high fee, high margin service to your agency offering. Experienced Brand Agencies and Strategy Consultancies will already be charging between $12,000 and $60,000 for brand strategy depending on the scope of market review and competitor analysis, and the comprehensiveness of their Strategic output.
For these experienced players, the great benefit of Brandvas is that it provides a tool to significantly reduce the time taken to prepare, facilitate and write-up a Brand Strategy project, adding the level of audience research client budgets can rarely afford, and spreading the workload across ore agency personnel, unblocking this expensive agency bottleneck.
For marketing agencies, consultants or marketers who do not currently provide a high level Brand Strategy service, Brandvas offers the expert system, facilitation guidance, tips and tools to enable them to do-so, and do so with confidence and in a profitable manner.
For many of this second group of agencies, understanding how much to charge for Brand Strategy is an unknown. Unlike most agency services offered, such as; identity or communications design, tactical marketing or social marketing, Brand Strategy is seen by most clients as high value, high IP service. Brand Strategy is usually ‘owned’ at client level by business owners or senior executives, and as such sits high in the value chain.
When a business has clarity on its strategic brand positioning and clear guidance to what it must do to reinforce and build that positioning, it is best situated to grow market share and build loyalty with clients or customers. These high value outcomes rightly demand a premium for the consulting IP that provides them.
The value to a business of a well considered and professionally executed Brand Strategy is influenced to an extent by the size of that business. Whilst a large organisation with hundreds of staff can justify the value of investing $20,000 - $40,000 for their brand strategy, an SME with a dozen staff and a $2m turnover cannot justify the same level of investment.
The flexible Brandvas process, along with the flexibility it provides to have a range of agency resources contributing to the project means that agencies with smaller clients can now charge between $5,000 - $10,000 for Brand Strategy and make good profit.
This will allow larger agencies to be able to service smaller clients with smaller budgets that they previously could not consider working with. For smaller agencies adding Brand Strategy to their offer it will allow them to now pitch for more projects, more of the scope of projects that perhaps they only pitched for a certain part of previously, as well as offer this service as a value add to existing clients or as an additional first stage for clients who perhaps don’t have brand strategy on their radar.
Further, the market data and audience profile data included in Brandvas is usually too expensive for most clients to purchase. Due to our exclusive partnerships we can offer this as part of the Brandvas process. Smart agencies may choose to separate this deliverable out from the brand strategy process and can easily charge a client an additional $5,000 - $8,000 for this component alone. Our experience is that many business owners and marketers are aware of the value of this data, see huge value in it and understand what good value it is even at this additional cost.
We would strongly suggest agencies don’t underestimate the value of the Brand Strategy process and outputs and constantly seek to find the right level of maximum charge rate for your clients. Over time you will see how high cost for high IP consulting brings with it a respect for the quality of the thinking that undercharging can quickly undermine.
We envisage that even the smallest agencies and consultants with small clients charge upwards of $5,000 for the Brandvas strategic process and outputs with the distinct possibility of charging separately for the research components and bundling the whole service together for $8,000-$15,000 and more.
As an example, with smaller clients or for clients who may be cost sensitive, we suggest breaking the brand strategy process into several stages, each with a deliverable which could include:
• Discovery / Project Planning $2,500 - $4,000
• Market research / data $3,000-$6,000
• Customer Personas $3,000 - $9,000
• Competitor Analysis $3,000 - $6,000
• Brand Strategy Workshop $3,000 - $12,000
• Brand Strategy Report write-up and refinement $3,000 - $9,000
You can see from this approach how the process can be broken down into a number of high value deliverables that may be presented to your client in a way that more clearly sets-out the business value you are providing and significantly increases what they are willing to pay.
For most agencies, winning a half dozen additional projects and selling the process in to a few existing clients can quickly add $100k-$200k of high margin billings - and that’s a good outcome in anyone’s language!!
