You pay for the damage that doesn't happen

A brand refresh lands, the public sees a nudged letterform and a cleaner wordmark, and the invoice reads like someone robbed a bank for moving a dot. The complaint writes itself, and sometimes it is fair. Some jobs really are small: a tidy-up for a young brand with little to lose, and when that is the work, we price it like the small job it is. A brand that already carries value is a different animal. There the visible change was never what you were buying. You were buying the far larger thing that did not appear on the slide: the probability that the value, the reputation, and the revenue attached to that mark survive being touched at all. That probability is expensive, because keeping it is hard.

The hours are the wrong ruler

Bill brand work by the hour and the maths turns against everyone. The specialist who spent fifteen years learning to land the right answer in a weekend gets paid for the weekend, while the one who flails for a month gets paid for the month. Speed and judgement, the two things you actually wanted, become the two things you refuse to reward.

The seller’s correction is to pad: add hours, add rounds, add a discovery phase nobody needed. Now both sides lose, slowly, on purpose. Cost-plus pricing works cleanly for commodities, where an hour of one supplier looks like an hour of another. A brand decision is not a commodity, and pretending it is only hides the value somewhere less honest.

What you are actually buying

Strip the deliverable away and the thing left in your hands is an assurance. Someone competent looked hard, tested against real people, and staked their name on a change that would, at minimum, do no harm. That is closer to underwriting than to drawing.

The restraint costs as much as the work: knowing which dot not to move, which equity not to spend, which clever idea to leave in the drawer because it reads well in the studio and badly in a checkout queue. When the assurance holds, it looks like you paid a lot for very little. That impression is the product working, quietly, which is the only way it ever works.

The downside does not fit in the brief

For a small brand a bad identity is a bruise. For a large one it is a line item with a comma in it. Every change to a widely held mark is a bet placed with other people’s recognition, and recognition is slow to build and quick to spend.

This is why walking into a strong brand with a brilliant unsolicited redesign is not bold, it is close to malpractice. The idea might be excellent and still cost more than it earns, because the ground it lands on is worth more than the idea. The question the seller has to answer is not “can I make this better.” It is what happens on the day it is worse, and who carries that.

The receipts, with the usual caveats

The downside is documented whenever anyone bothers to add it up. In 2009 PepsiCo relaunched Tropicana’s cartons through the agency Arnell, swapping the orange-and-straw image for a clean glass of juice. Sales fell about twenty percent, roughly thirty million dollars, in under two months, and the old carton was back on shelves by late February.¹ The change looked minor and cost a fortune, which is the entire point.

The next year Gap unveiled a plain Helvetica logo and pulled it after about a week under public revolt. The widely repeated hundred-million-dollar figure is brand-value folklore rather than a receipt, but the speed of the retreat was real.² Both were small visible moves onto expensive ground.

Careful is not the same as timid

In 2016 Mastercard began removing its own name, first shrinking the wordmark and by 2019 dropping it entirely, leaving two interlocking circles to stand alone. On paper that is a far bigger deletion than anything Gap attempted, and it held, because it followed decades of accumulated recognition and a great deal of testing before anyone shipped it.³

The lesson is not that changing a strong mark is forbidden. It is that the difference between the Mastercard result and the Gap result is mostly the invisible work, and the invisible work is exactly what the frightening number on the invoice pays for.

How many zeros

There is a fair question hiding under the grumbling about price.

How many zeros would you want on your fee before you promised a client that their most valuable asset comes to no harm on your watch, with your name on it in public for years?

Set that number and you have found value-based pricing, whatever you choose to call it.

Buyers who dislike the phrase can have it dressed as a rate and a count of hours, tuned to land in the same place, as long as it does not drift absurdly from the market. Plenty of good work is quietly priced this way already. The label matters less than the honesty underneath it.

The inconvenient part

Cheap brand work is a bargain right up until the value it was meant to protect walks out the door, and by then the saving is the least interesting number in the room. The visible change is where you point. The price is for everything you were not looking at. The only real question is whether the person quoting it can tell you, honestly, what happens on the day the change makes things worse, and whether they will still be standing next to their name when it does.

From words to done.

Sources

1. The Branding Journal, “What to Learn From Tropicana’s Packaging Redesign Failure” (Arnell redesign, ~20% / ~$30M sales fall, reverted February 2009). https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-from-tropicanas-packaging-redesign-failure/
2. The Branding Journal, “Learnings From the Gap Logo Redesign Fail” (reverted after roughly a week; the $100M figure is unverified brand-value folklore). https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2021/04/learnings-gap-logo-redesign-fail/
3. Dezeen, “Pentagram’s Mastercard rebrand drops credit card company’s name from logo” (wordmark removed after decades of equity and extensive testing). https://www.dezeen.com/2019/01/10/mastercard-rebrand-pentagram-design/