Brand

It can work well, and there are genuine advantages – the brand and digital expression are developed together, which can produce more coherent results than handing a finished brand to a separate web team later. But it requires careful sequencing and discipline.

The risk is that the web project starts before the brand is stable. If you begin building pages before the identity is signed off, you'll either have to rework them later or lock the brand too early to avoid that rework. Either way you lose something. A combined programme needs a clear checkpoint between brand completion and web build commencement.

For financial services specifically, there's an additional consideration: brand assets and website copy will both go through compliance review, and it helps to sequence that so you're not getting sign-off on two major pieces of work simultaneously if your compliance function has limited bandwidth.

What this means for you: If you're running brand and web together, agree on the sequencing upfront. Brand strategy and identity should be complete and approved before the web design phase begins. Web copy can often run in parallel with identity work, but the final visual treatment needs to be stable before the site design is locked. Build that checkpoint into the project plan explicitly.

Financial service brands can often feel samey, which is why we use deep sector insight and customer research to identify what makes you different and use it to drive bold creative that cuts through. 

From simplifying complex propositions to finding the human story behind the numbers, the brands we craft resonate with the people who matter the most, all while staying compliant. 

What this means for you: Distinctiveness in financial services usually comes from insight about your customers rather than from visual invention. If an agency leads with how the work will look before it has asked who you’re talking to, be sceptical.

It depends on the scope, but most brand projects run between 8-16 weeks from discovery to delivery. We move at pace without cutting corners because getting your brand right is worth the investment. 

We’ll give you a clear timeline upfront and keep you in the loop at every stage. No surprises, no delays, just planning your launch with confidence.

What this means for you: Eight to sixteen weeks is a reasonable working assumption, but the variable that moves it most is your own decision-making. Agree upfront who signs off and how quickly.

It depends almost entirely on what you mean by rebranding. A logo refresh and updated visual guidelines for a small business might be £5,000-£12,000. A full brand programme for a mid-size company – including strategy, messaging, visual identity, tone of voice, and guidelines – typically runs £20,000-£60,000. For a large financial services firm where compliance sign-off, a wide range of applications, and internal change management are involved, you can add another zero.

What drives the cost is less the output itself and more the thinking behind it. A new logo is a commodity. A new logo that's the visible expression of a clear brand strategy, built around an understanding of your audience and competitors, is a different thing. You might not be able to tell them apart in a PDF, but one will work harder for you.

The things that tend to inflate brand costs unnecessarily are excessive rounds of revision, scope that expands to include digital or print production work mid-project, and strategy phases that are billed as separate projects rather than built into the programme from the start.

What this means for you: Before you get quotes, be clear about what you're trying to solve. If the answer is 'we look a bit dated,' that's probably a refresh brief. If the answer is 'we're entering a new market and our brand no longer reflects what we do,' that's a strategic repositioning – and the cost and process should reflect that difference.

This is probably the most honest question in branding, and most agencies won't ask it because the answer sometimes means not doing the project. Familiarity feels like staleness when you're looking at the same brand every day – what your team is bored of may be exactly what your customers recognise and trust.

A few things that suggest genuine outdatedness rather than internal boredom: the brand no longer reflects what the business does (because the business has changed), it's creating friction in new markets or with new audiences, it looks noticeably dated compared to direct competitors, or it was never particularly coherent in the first place and has accumulated inconsistencies over time.

If none of those are true – if the brand is actually recognised, consistent, and reasonably well-received by customers – the case for a full rebrand is weaker than it might feel internally. A refresh might address the boredom without the risk and cost of changing something that's working.

What this means for you: Talk to customers before you commission any brand work. Ask them what they think of when they hear your name or see your logo. Their answers are usually more grounding than the internal conversation. If there's a gap between what customers think and what you think you are, that gap is worth addressing. If there isn't, that's useful information too.

There's no single right answer, and the wrong choice in either direction creates real problems. A single unified site makes brand management simpler, improves SEO through domain authority consolidation, and reduces the cost of maintenance. A multi-site approach can make sense when products serve genuinely different audiences, when compliance requirements differ significantly between product lines, or when the brand positioning of each product is distinct enough that combining them would dilute both.

For regulated firms, the compliance consideration is often decisive. If one product is FCA-regulated and another is not, there can be good reasons to keep them separate to avoid creating an implicit association that could mislead users. If two products are both regulated but have different risk profiles and different target audiences, a shared site needs careful navigation to avoid cross-contamination of messaging.

The operational cost of multiple websites is often underestimated. Two sites means two sets of updates, two compliance review processes, two sets of redirects when things move, twice the maintenance. Many firms discover this too late.

What this means for you: If you're considering a multi-site structure, map out the compliance and audience logic before making the technical decision. If the case for separation is strong, commit to it properly with a clear governance model for both sites. If the case is marginal, the operational simplicity of a single site is usually worth more than the perceived benefit of separation.

A refresh keeps the fundamentals – the core visual identity, the positioning, the brand personality – and updates the execution. New typography, refined colours, updated photography style, maybe an evolved logo mark. A rebrand starts from a different place: it questions the strategy, the positioning, and sometimes the name and audience entirely. Those are meaningfully different things.

Most businesses that think they need a rebrand actually need a refresh. The strategy is sound, the audience is right, the market position is clear – it just needs a visual update to stop feeling tired. That's a much smaller project and carries much less risk. A full rebrand touches every touchpoint your business has, can create confusion in the market if handled badly, and typically takes longer and costs more than people expect.

The scenarios where a full rebrand makes sense: a merger or acquisition, a significant change in what the business does or who it serves, reputational issues linked to the brand name or identity, or a founding-era brand that was never built with any strategic intent and can't be fixed through cosmetic changes.

What this means for you: Be honest about what the brief is actually trying to solve. If you're starting with 'we don't like the logo,' work backwards to find out why. If it's strategic, you probably need a rebrand. If it's visual, a refresh is more proportionate. A good agency will help you diagnose that – and should tell you if the answer is 'neither right now.'

We start with discovery, getting under the skin of your business, your audience and where you want to go. 

From there, we move to insight and strategy. We figure out how your brand should stand out, what it should stand for, and why people should care. 

Then comes the fun bit: bringing it all to life. We craft your identity and tell your story in a way that looks right, feels right, and actually connects with the people you’re trying to reach.

You’ll be involved every step of the way.

What this means for you: Expect to be involved throughout rather than presented to at the end. If your team can’t commit time to discovery and review sessions, the work will be weaker regardless of who does it.

A logo is a visual mark. Brand strategy is the thinking that determines what that mark should communicate, to whom, and why. One is an output; the other is the foundation everything else is built on.

Brand strategy covers things like: what position you occupy in the market, how you want to be perceived relative to competitors, what your core values mean in practice, who your target audience actually is and what they care about. It also covers tone of voice – how you sound in writing – which shapes everything from your website copy to how your team responds to complaints.

A logo built without brand strategy can still look nice. But a logo built with a clear strategy has a better chance of doing what you actually need it to do – which is communicate the right things to the right people quickly and consistently.

What this means for you: If you're commissioning a new visual identity, ask the agency what their strategy process looks like and how it informs the design. If they go straight to moodboards without a discovery or strategy phase, you're getting design opinion rather than design reasoning. That may be fine for a small refresh, but it's a risk for anything more significant.

We have an in-house copywriter. The work starts with a tone of voice document – an articulation of how your brand should sound, not a set of adjectives – and the content is then written to match it. Having the same person define the voice and write to it is deliberate; tone of voice documents produced in isolation tend to be admired and ignored.

There are two distinct kinds of content and they need different things. Long-form work – pages, articles, guides, technical explanation – has to be accurate, structured and useful, and in financial services it has to survive compliance review. Creative content works differently: shorter, sharper, doing a job in a headline or a line of ad copy. Both have to sound like you, and both are things we do properly rather than treating one as the serious discipline and the other as decoration.

We do use AI tools in content production, trained on the relevant tone of voice. What we don’t do is publish their output unreviewed. Everything is reviewed and edited by a person before it goes anywhere, which is both a quality position and, in a regulated context, a necessary control.

What this means for you: Ask to see a tone of voice document an agency has produced, and then ask to see content written from it. The gap between the two tells you whether the document is a working tool or a deliverable that was filed and forgotten.