How to choose a branding agency

You have decided the company needs brand work, or a board, an investor or a new chief executive has decided it for you. Now there are forty studios with beautiful portfolios, and nothing on their sites says which of them can do your job. A bad choice is slow to discover. A rebrand runs for months, and the mismatch usually shows only when the first concepts arrive and answer a question you never asked.

This page sets out how to choose: deciding the job before the shortlist, reading a portfolio for evidence rather than taste, checking claims where they were made, finding out who will do the work, and the terms to settle before you sign. It does not name a winner. Our rankings do that, and prices have a guide of their own.

Decide the job before you look at anyone

Most branding engagements that go wrong are not failures of talent. They are failures of fit: a consumer packaging house asked to position a B2B software company, or a twelve-person identity studio asked to run a naming programme across nine markets. Both firms can be excellent and still be the wrong firm.

So settle three things in writing before you open a single portfolio.

Which job it is. A refresh, a repositioning, or architecture and naming. They are different purchases with different suppliers, and what a branding agency costs sets out how each is scoped and priced. If you are not yet sure the problem is the brand rather than the website, branding or web design has a one-day test.

Where the difficulty is. If it is aesthetic, a mark that looks dated or a palette nobody likes, a small studio or a strong freelancer will do it well. If it is structural, several audiences, several products, a regulator, or a brand applied by people who will never meet the designer, you need a firm that has built systems that survive all of that.

Who will apply it afterwards. A system your own team runs needs templates and rules. One an agency of record runs needs a proper handover. One that lives mostly inside a product needs a firm that treats identity and interface as one problem.

Those three answers cut a long list faster than any portfolio, and they decide which shortlist to start from: B2B, healthcare, fintech, firms based in the US, or the global field.

Read a portfolio for the job, not the taste

Every branding portfolio looks good, because every studio shows its best work. What you need from it is narrower: evidence that this firm has done your job before, and that the result held up.

• Find your job, twice. Not the best case study, the one closest to what you are buying: the same kind of company, the same kind of problem, a similar scale. Once might be luck. If you cannot find it at all, you would be paying for the firm's first attempt.
• Look at the brand today, not at launch. Case studies are photographed on release day. Visit the client's site, app and social accounts now. If the identity is still recognisably in use two or three years later, the system worked. If it has been quietly replaced, ask what happened.
• Check that the client says so too. A launch announcement on the client's own newsroom naming the agency is stronger evidence than the agency's page, because the client chose to say it.
• Ask to see a system, not a logo. Ask for the guidelines or template set from one past project. Rules other people can follow are what you are paying for, and a page of marks shows none of them.

Check an award where it was given

Awards appear on almost every studio site, and they range from rigorous to meaningless. The test is whether you can find the win in the organiser's own records. D&AD, for example, keeps a searchable archive of its Pencil winners with dedicated branding categories (New Brand Identity, Brand Identity Refresh and Brand Transformation), so a claimed win takes a minute to confirm.

Three things are worth separating on a credentials slide. A shortlist or finalist place in a juried scheme is real, but smaller than a win. An award for something other than client work, such as a tool, a talk or a community resource, says nothing about your project. And a badge from a directory or listing site usually records that a profile exists, not that anyone judged the work.

Ownership belongs in the same check. Several of the best-known brand consultancies sit inside the same few holding companies, and few say so on their own sites. If you plan a competitive pitch, ask each firm who owns it, so that you are not testing three subsidiaries of one parent against each other. The global ranking names the parent on each entry that has one.

Find out who will do the work

The people who present the pitch and the people who do the work are often not the same. At a large firm the pitch team may be senior people whose job is winning business, with delivery sitting elsewhere. At a small studio the founders do the work, but they cannot run four workstreams at once.

Neither shape is wrong. What matters is knowing which one you are buying. Ask for the names of the people on your project day to day and what share of their time it gets. Then write those names into the contract, with a clause on what happens if any of them leave.

Keep the selection small

A long competitive pitch costs you as much time as it costs the agencies. Three firms is enough, chosen on the job, the portfolio and the team. Meet each one to talk about your problem rather than asking for free creative work: concepts drawn before any research are a guess at the answer, judged before anyone has understood the question. If you want to see how a firm thinks before committing to the whole project, pay your first choice for a short discovery phase and make continuing optional.

Five things to settle before you sign

These five are cheap to agree before the work starts and expensive to argue about after it ends.

1. Who owns the work. Under US copyright law, a logo commissioned from an outside firm is not automatically yours. A commissioned work only counts as a work made for hire if it falls within one of nine categories set out in the law, and a logo or identity is not among them. Ownership has to be transferred, and a transfer of copyright is only valid in writing, signed by the owner. Make sure the contract assigns it, including rejected concepts if you want those too.
2. Which typefaces are licensed, and for what. Fonts in an identity are usually licensed, not owned, and licences are priced by use. Klim Type Foundry, for example, sells desktop, web, app, advertising and broadcast licences separately, and prices app licences on monthly active users or downloads. Ask which fonts the system uses, who buys the licence, and whether it covers your website, your app and everyone who will use it.
3. Who clears the name. If there is a new company or product name, someone has to check it is free to use. The USPTO's guidance on hiring an attorney describes a comprehensive clearance search covering federal registrations, state registrations and unregistered marks. That is legal work, so agree before naming starts whether the agency works with counsel or you hire your own.
4. What is handed over, in what formats. Source files, guidelines, and templates for the things you actually produce. List them by name.
5. Who signs off on your side. One named person with final approval. Every phase waits on them, and an unclear answer is the easiest way for a timeline to slip.