What you are actually buying
A large part of the Peninsula economy is sole traders, small teams and seasonal businesses. The gap between a real operator and someone having a go is often smaller than it looks from the outside, and a customer has very little to judge it on before they call.
So the job branding does for a business this size is narrower and more useful than the word suggests. It is not positioning or purpose. It is whether you look like one business rather than three, whether your ute and your website and your invoice appear to belong to the same people, and whether any of it suggests you might have quietly stopped trading in 2019.
That matters twice over here, because a good share of the money comes from people with no local knowledge at all. A Melbourne buyer with a place in Sorrento, a family who have just bought in Blairgowrie and need six trades at once. They cannot ask a neighbour about you. They are deciding from a phone screen and a photo, and appearance is most of what they have.
The good news is that this is a small job. It is a mark that works at small sizes, one colour, one typeface, decent photos of your own work, and the discipline to use the same ones everywhere. That is a few thousand dollars at most and often considerably less, which is a very different proposition from what the word branding usually gets attached to.
The work
Six things, and most businesses down here already have two or three of them in some form. The work is usually fixing and unifying rather than starting again.
It has to read at the size of a favicon, on a shirt pocket, and on a ute door seen from across a car park. Most logos that fail down here fail because they were designed at A4 on a screen and never tested at 30mm in one colour.
Not a palette of nine and a type system. One colour people start to associate with you, and one typeface used everywhere. Consistency is doing almost all of the work, and consistency is free.
On the Peninsula this matters more than the logo. Real photos of real jobs, taken on a phone in decent light, beat a polished mark sitting above stock imagery every time. It is also the part you can keep adding to yourself.
Whether it is legible when said over the phone, whether the domain and the socials are free, whether it boxes you into one suburb or one service you might drop. Worth an hour before anyone draws anything.
Vector source files, a one-colour version, a version that works on a dark background, and the licence for the typeface. Without these you cannot get a shirt printed or a sign made without going back to whoever drew it.
Website, Google Business Profile, invoices, vehicle and workwear. A customer sees you across several of these and decides whether you look like one business or three. Getting them to match is usually the cheapest improvement available.
Being straight about it
Branding is the easiest service in this industry to inflate, because almost none of it can be measured. A workshop that produces a purpose statement, a forty page brand book, a tone of voice document, a rebrand because the current one is five years old. All of these are real things that real agencies sell, and for a business turning over a few hundred thousand a year, almost none of them earn their cost back.
What does earn it back is narrower. A mark that reproduces properly, photography of your own work, and the same name, colour and typeface everywhere a customer meets you. That is most of the available gain, and it is the cheap part.
If the budget is genuinely tight, spend it in this order: photos of your work first, because they cost almost nothing and do the most. Then consistency across what you already have. Then the mark. A new logo sitting above the same tired stock photography changes very little, and we would rather tell you that before you spend the money than after.
The same logic runs through how we price a Peninsula website, and it is why our view on agency reporting is what it is.
The one that is worth it
There are four honest reasons, and being bored of your logo is not one of them. A rebrand resets whatever recognition you have already built, and for a local business that recognition is a large part of what you own.
The name no longer fits. You are called something with Rosebud in it and half your work is now in Mount Eliza, or the name describes a service you stopped offering three years ago.
You are chasing a different customer. Moving from domestic to commercial, or from local work to the Melbourne buyer with the holiday house, is a genuinely different audience and often a genuinely different look.
Nobody has the files. Your logo exists as a JPEG somebody exported in 2014 and the designer is uncontactable. You are one signage quote away from having to redraw it anyway.
It physically does not work. It is unreadable on a vehicle, it turns to mud at favicon size, or it needs four colours to exist. That is a functional fault rather than a matter of taste.
If none of those apply, the money is better spent on being found than on being redrawn.
FAQ
A logo and the basics around it for a small local business generally runs in the high hundreds to low thousands, depending on how much is being designed and how many versions you need. A full identity with signage, vehicle artwork and printed material goes up from there. What we would not do is quote you for a brand strategy exercise, because very few businesses this size get their money back on one.
You need to look consistent, and a mark is the easiest way to get there. But a business name set properly in one good typeface, used the same way everywhere, is a perfectly respectable brand and better than a bad logo. If the choice is between a cheap logo and consistent typography with good photos of your work, take the second one.
Yes, and usually more than for a larger business, because you have fewer chances to make an impression. On the Peninsula your vehicle is often your most-seen asset, parked in a driveway in a street where six neighbours are also thinking about the same job. A clear name, a readable number and a mark that works in one colour on a ute door is a genuinely good investment. A brand book is not.
You can, and for a brand-new business testing an idea it is a reasonable place to start. Two catches. You usually cannot get the vector source files, so the first time you need signage or embroidery you are stuck. And generated marks tend to be generic enough that two businesses in the same trade end up looking related. If the business is working and you intend to keep it, get the mark drawn properly once.
With us, yes. You get the vector source files, the exported versions and the details of any typeface licence, and they are yours. This is worth asking anyone you hire, because a mark you cannot reproduce is a problem you only discover at the moment you need a sign made or a shirt printed, which is never a convenient moment.
When the name no longer describes what you do, when you have changed who you sell to, when you cannot reproduce your existing mark because nobody has the files, or when it genuinely will not work at the sizes you need. Those are real reasons. Being a bit bored of it is not, and a rebrand resets the recognition you have already built, which for a local business is most of what you have.
We design the artwork and supply it in the formats a signwriter or an embroiderer needs, then you use whoever you like locally to produce it. We would rather you kept that money on the Peninsula with someone who can fix it if it goes wrong than run it through us with a margin on top.
Two to four weeks for a logo and the core pieces, mostly determined by how quickly decisions get made rather than by drawing time. If it is going on a vehicle or a sign before summer, start it in winter. Signwriters and printers down here are genuinely booked out by November.
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