How long does it take to build a brand?

How much time do you need to set aside for the branding process?

One question we field pretty regularly is, how long will it take to create a brand? And despite what some may tell you, the answer is not straightforward.

Without a brand, it's nearly impossible to make business and marketing decisions — this increases the urgency to get a brand together. So time is critical.

When you're looking at reinvigorating your business, often branding is at the bottom of the list. In an emergency, it's easy to jump to social media marketing to run ads and try and quickly boost sales. But what happens when the target market doesn't understand or care enough to buy?

Sometimes setting your brand's foundations or creating a brand personality can have a bigger impact in the long-term.

Whether you're refreshing your brand, rebranding, or even creating something from scratch - you'll want a smooth resolution and the shortest timeframe possible, so you can start marketing and making sales. Sometimes, knowing when to rebrand is hard, here's When's the Right time to Rebrand? to see if it's right for you.

Let's explore the various factors that impact a brand development. And remember... Every decision you make, is affected by branding.

The Brand Design Process

Before we get into how long it takes we need to talk through the process of creating a brand.

1. Book a Discovery Call
2. Complete a thorough Brand Audit, if your brand already exists.
3. Onboarding and set up a Project Management system
4. Brand Strategy Workshop, if the audit uncovers the need for one, or you don't have one.
5. Customer and market research, we need to understand your industry, its history, your customers and your competition.
6. Brand Strategy document creation
7. Naming (if needed)
8. Moodboarding, before any conceptual work, moodboards help to direct the style of the brand, giving us logo inspiration.
9. Visual Identity Creation - logos and icons are sketched based on the strategy, research and moodboard work. Sketching evolves the imagination and helps us see logos in different ways.
10. Presentations and chance to feedback - a thorough exploration of brand concepts will be presented for you to see, with designs shown in context so you can visualise how it's starting to take shape. You're role is to gather concise feedback to allow me to accurately develop the logo.
11. Visual Asset Creation - and delivery on final assets.
12. Creation of Brand Guidelines
13. Website Design & Development
14. Copywriting
15. Photography/Videography
16. Execution of the Marketing Strategy
17. Launch and update of Brand Guidelines

As you can see, we kick things off by getting to know your business on a discovery call, a brand audit, or a brand strategy workshop.

An average Branding Project will take 6 months

Based on past projects from step 1 through to completion, the average brand project takes 6 months.

Before you leave this page, this number has been skewed by projects that have taken 2-3 weeks and ones that took 12 months.

The reason that some of them blow out to 12 months is very circumstantial and often an indication of a complex rebrand.

Refreshes and branding from scratch are, typically, shorter and closer to 4 months for a full scale project, but timelines have to be stuck to rigidly, and everything has to be well communicated, and for someone to keep everyone in line.

There's a huge amount of factors that affect the timelines, let's take a look.

It depends on picking the correct branding approach

As mentioned above, you might need a brand refresh, a rebrand or to begin from a clean slate. Rather than picking what you think you need, it's worth spending a little time auditing where your brand currently is.

A brand audit looks at your brand from a verbal, visual, competitor and behavioural aspect and this helps determine the level of branding work that takes place.

It's important that your branding agency doesn't make assumptions and tries to convince you that a full scale rebrand is needed, sometimes, simply clearing up the message and tweaking the visuals will be enough.

Whatever the outcome, step 1 and 2 are the most important step. The Discovery Call tells us about your project and a Brand Audit stops you from spending unnecessary time and money on brand strategy workshops or visual identity design when you potentially don't need it.

It depends on you, your team and how you collaborate

You are one of the key cogs, but so is your team. Select that core team carefully as they will be in the branding process every part of the way. It's important to have someone on that team who drives the project, someone who keeps the whole team on track. It might be you and your branding team will drive things along too. But either way, each step, from choosing a name for your brand to website mockups, to the launch — requires your teams feedback.

The most effective brands are a collaborative process between the branding agency and the client, if that's missing, the whole thing takes a lot longer, and can incur additional costs.

At this point (step 2) a smooth onboarding process and project management system, like the one we use, Asana, will help keep everything on track and to budget.

it depends on whether you need to build the Brand's DNA

Your audit maybe uncovered the need to revisit the Brand's DNA, or perhaps you never touched it, there's no judgement here. Whatever happened, setting a strong foundation and uncovering what your brands stands for, how it helps customers and who the customers are, is vital. And, can unfortunately take up a big chunk of time.

It can go a little bit like this:

• Brand Strategy Workshop (1 day)
• Customer research – calls, focus groups, surveys (1-3 weeks)
• Market research (1-3 week)
• Brand Strategy document (2 weeks)
• Naming (1 day - 2 months)

There's a big disparity between some of those topics because the variables are so wide, customer and market research can take an unusually long time depending on customer availability, while naming can be either simple, or extremely complex.

If the core team is also unavailable, or struggling to reach a consensus, it can be very difficult to make final decisions, which will delay the branding process.

It depends on which Branding Design Team you work with

The team you pick to work with will influence how long things take. The processes they set out will have an impact. The teams efficiency in communicating and being available to implement your feedback.

Earlier, you audited your brand to decide whether you need a rebrand or redesign, and you need to do the same thing with picking your branding agency that you work with.

There's a few things to ask your agency:

1. How many projects do you have on at the moment? This routes out if team are overloaded with projects.
2. What stage are the projects at? This tells you even more, if there's 10 different projects at the concept stage, you'll be somewhere in that mix, and unless they are very large agency, delivery might be slow
3. What's your process? If the agency isn't crystal clear on the process, things get lost in the cracks.

It's really important that your branding agency has capacity for your work, get a firm timeline for the moodboarding, visual identity concepts and developments, and whatever the brand rollout looks like. This way the team can be held accountable.

Your team and you need to be available for feedback, but so do the design team.

It depends on what you need to launch (deliverables)

These are the customer facing touch points, or marketing collateral you need to present your brand professionally. Common deliverables include:

• Corporate identity materials - letterheads, compliments slips, business cards, slide decks
• Social media templates
• Creative pieces (posters, t-shirts, mugs, promo gifts, etc.)
• Signage (window decals, storefront signage)
• Website design and development
• Copywriting
• Videoshoots
• Photoshoots

The type and number of marketing touchpoints will have a big impact on the total time frame.

E.g., if you’re building a brand from scratch, the website needs to be created during that process. The type of website you’re creating influences the timeline of the website. If it’s a simple site between 1 and 5 pages it would take less time than a complex, functionality rich website. Ie sites with memberships built in, or complex embedded payment systems.

Our advice on time allowance

Remember, every decision made, affects your brand. So it’s important to get it done right, the first time. It makes the best use of your time and money.

Our advice is to give yourself plenty of time to go through the process. Cultivating your brand should be at the top of your list—not at the bottom.

The branding process aims to affect your brand perception in the market, so it needs to be done right the first time. Every detail has to be carefully considered as the outcome will affect your brands sales and growth.

You might also be wondering...

How much time do I need to set aside for a branding project?

This is dependent on how many decision makers get involved and what areas of branding you look at.

Here's a rough breakdown for everything.

• Brand Audits (2 hours) + Presentation of findings (0.5 hours).
• Brand Strategy Workshops (4-8 hours) + Document presentation (1.5 hours) + Feedback from you (1.5 hours)
• Moodboard Feedback (1 hour)
• Brand Concept + Development feedback (3-4 hours)
• Website Design feedback (1-2 hours)
• Copywriting feedback, extraction of information and interviews (4-8 hours)
• Marketing and Customer Journey map development (4-8 hours)
• Final tweaks before rollout (2 hours)

The Branding Process can be lengthy, but if you’re gonna do it, do it just once and get it right.