The question tends to arrive at the same moment: the website is dated, nobody likes the logo any more, the name sounds like the year you founded. So let us do all of it again. A rebrand cost is then measured against the design quote, and that is exactly where the reasoning goes wrong. The design quote is the only line item that sits on the table beforehand. The rest of the bill arrives later and in instalments: signage, vehicles, forms, trade mark protection, redirects, and the months in which neither your customers nor Google can find you under the new name. This piece works through the invisible line items and names the cases where the money is better left where it is.
What does protecting the new name cost?
Less than most people fear, which is precisely why it is the wrong place to economise. Filing a German trade mark with the DPMA costs 290 euros electronically for up to three classes of goods and services, with each further class at 100 euros; renewal after ten years comes to 750 euros plus 260 euros per class from the fourth (DPMA fee schedule, as at 31 July 2026). In Austria, the patent office charges 294 euros for an online filing including a 44 euro document fee, again covering three classes, with each further class at 75 euros (Austrian Patent Office, filing fees). Protection across the EU costs 850 euros online for the first class at the EUIPO, 50 euros for the second and 150 euros for every further one (EUIPO, fees and payments).
That is the figure everybody looks up, and it is never the problem. The problem is the checking that comes before it. Offices do not screen an application against older similar marks; the market does that. Once a German mark is registered, holders of earlier rights have a three-month window in which to file opposition (section 42 MarkenG). Order the signage first and file afterwards, and you risk paying for the entire rollout twice. The order is always the same: search, file, then print.
Why does the rollout cost more than the design?
Because the design happens once and the name is stuck to a thousand things. How large that gap gets can be read in a case that was disclosed in full: Britain's Highways Agency became Highways England in 2015. In response to a freedom of information request, the authority itemised what it spent (FOI response 762199, 24 May 2018). The budget for the changeover was 150,000 pounds. All visual identity, concept development and design work was done in-house, so not a single pound went out in external fees.
It still spent more: 106,000 pounds on priority branding changes, 70,000 pounds on traffic officer vehicles, 19,000 pounds on offices and control centres, 15,000 pounds on depots and 2,000 pounds on the internal and external digital presence. By our own addition that is 212,000 pounds against a budget of 150,000. And it did not stop there: the authority puts winter service vehicles at up to 100,000 pounds and uniforms at an estimated 200,000, both spread across the normal replacement cycle. The logo was free. The jackets worn by the people carrying it were not.
For a firm of fifteen people the amounts are smaller and the list is identical: vehicle livery, workwear, signs on the building, stamps, invoice and quotation templates, contracts and terms, every employee email address, social profiles, review profiles, directory listings, the Google Business Profile, packaging, the trade stand. Write that list before you sign the quote. It is the actual bill.
What happens to your visibility when the domain changes?
It does not travel with you on its own. A new name almost always means a new domain, which turns a brand question into a technical project with a clock of its own. Google's documentation on a site move with URL changes is unusually plain about it: every old address needs a permanent server-side redirect, ideally status code 301 or 308. On duration it says, verbatim, "Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year". And on visibility during the transition: "the visibility of your content in Search may fluctuate temporarily during the move. This is normal and a site's rankings will settle down over time." For small and medium-sized sites, Google reckons on a few weeks for most pages to move across.
There is a second deadline that many people miss. The change of address in Search Console is time-limited: the move is flagged for 180 days, the redirects should stand at least that long, and after that, "After the 180 day period, Google does not recognize any relationship between the old and new sites". Google also recommends explicitly that you keep paying for the old domain for at least a year so that nobody else picks it up. Cancel the old address after three months because the project feels finished, and you throw away the remainder of the redirect. What a 301 redirect can and cannot carry is set out in the glossary.
The part no redirect rescues is the name itself. It is a search query. People who know you type it, directories carry it, old invoices and referrals repeat it. There is no status code for that query. It fades slowly, and the new name has to be built from nothing. The technical side of a move is done in four weeks. Recognition is not.
When is a rebrand not worth it?
When recognition is your most valuable asset and the real problem sits somewhere else. The textbook case is the British postal service: in January 2001 the Royal Mail group became Consignia. The changeover cost two million pounds, of which 500,000 went on finding the name alone. Sixteen months later the company went back to the old name, and going back cost again: over a million pounds, mostly for replacing Consignia signage on some 3,000 buildings (Post & Parcel, 13 June 2002). The reversal was not a design failure. The company had abandoned its overseas expansion and refocused on the loss-making domestic core business, for which the old name was the better fit. The new name had never solved a problem; it had accompanied a strategy that did not arrive.
The research shows the same pattern, in cooler language. Laurent Muzellec and Mary Lambkin examined 166 rebranded companies and found that rebranding is most often triggered by structural change, above all mergers and acquisitions. Their finding on effect is the genuinely useful sentence: "a change in marketing aesthetics affects brand equity less than other factors such as employees' behaviour" (European Journal of Marketing, volume 40, issue 7/8, 2006, pages 803 to 824). Put differently: if your brand equity is suffering, the cause is more likely to be what your people do than which typeface they do it in.
The most expensive case is also the best known. Brand Finance valued the Twitter brand at 5.7 billion US dollars in January 2022, at just under 3.9 billion in 2023 and at 673.3 million in 2024, a fall of roughly 88 per cent in two years; the brand strength index dropped 12.7 points to 56.9 out of 100 (Brand Finance, Media 50, published 12 September 2024). Said honestly: Brand Finance does not attribute the collapse to the renaming alone, but to the loss of advertising revenue and the reputational damage over the same period. That is exactly the point. A name cannot rescue what is falling apart beside it, but it can lose access to everything that was there before.
When does the change carry after all?
When it ends a condition you would otherwise live with permanently. Four triggers survive the arithmetic. The name collides with earlier rights and a law firm is writing to you. The business merges, is sold or acquires, and two names in one market cost more than one. The name boxes you in because it carries a city, a single product or a founder who is no longer in the company. Or the name is damaged and the damage is publicly documented.
In every other case the intermediate step is the better buy. Very often the problem is not the name but its ordering: over the years a firm accumulates three product names, two domains and a sub-brand, and nobody can tell what belongs to what any more. The answer to that is not a new name but a brand architecture, meaning a deliberate decision about which name leads and which runs beneath it. That costs a few workshops and no 3,000 signs. Why the visible layer comes last anyway is something we took apart in the piece on visual identity as the final step. And if the name stays but nobody notices it, that is a different problem, covered in the piece on why flawless brands become invisible.
Three levers for the next fortnight
1. Write the complete name inventory before you accept a design quote. Every place your name appears: vehicles, clothing, signs, templates, contracts, email addresses, profiles, directories, packaging, domains. Put an amount and a date behind each line. That list is the bill; the design quote is one line in it.
2. Check the brand architecture first. For every name you carry, ask what it stands for and who knows it. In most cases what is missing is not a new brand but a decision about which name leads. That is the version of the project that needs no 3,000 signs.
3. If it does become a change, plan the move as its own project with a one-year horizon. A complete list of the old addresses, one 301 redirect per address, the change of address in Search Console, the old domain paid for twelve months, plus a date six months out when somebody checks which old addresses still get traffic. Two names run in parallel for a year; plan for both.
If you are currently sitting between "start again" and "put it in order", we are happy to cost it out with you, using your own name inventory and honest amounts behind each line. The cheaper version is often the more effective one too. 🧾