Meet, ask the right questions, build the budget together: our advice to business leaders looking for a branding agency.
When a business leader comes to see us after meeting several agencies, they often have a comparison table in mind. The proposals are lined up, the amounts too, and the decision seems almost made in advance. That's understandable: when you're responsible for a budget, the figure is naturally the first thing that catches your eye.
Yet choosing a branding agency is closer to recruiting than to buying. It's about finding the partner you will spend several months thinking with about what your brand should become. Our advice fits in a few lines: meet a few agencies in person, ask them about the way they think rather than about their ideas, build the budget with them and choose the one you genuinely click with.
Comparing prices is a natural reflex. As a CEO or head of department, you manage a budget, and that budget ends up weighing on the decision. We don't dispute that for a second.
What we do observe, however, is that the budget is often seen as something fixed, set in stone, take it or leave it. We like to compare it to a restaurant menu. After listening to the people we meet and understanding their challenges and what they have available, we put together the menu that seems right to us. But that menu is nothing final: it's the starting point of a conversation.
That's why we ask a question early on that can come as a surprise: what resources can you dedicate to this project? It isn't about finding out how far we could go, but about understanding the framework we'll be working in. Weighing your ambitions against your resources allows us to propose a realistic, aligned approach. It's the foundation of any consulting work: for us, a good agency understands your resources before building a plan, not the other way round. If you'd like to know what makes the price of such a project vary, we've detailed the ranges we see in this article on the cost of a brand strategy.
In a first meeting or a tender, many companies expect the agency to show that it has already understood their brand. Some even ask: "In your view, what's wrong with us?"
We understand that expectation, but honestly, it's impossible for us to answer it seriously from the outside. We can share how we perceive your brand at a given moment. We can't know what is right or wrong, because we don't yet know the intention behind it: what your management and your teams want to convey, and what you want your clients to feel. Putting forward ideas under those conditions would mostly mean telling you what you want to hear. We prefer to acknowledge that we don't have the full context yet, and that we'll discover it together with you.
The most useful questions are about the agency itself:
These answers will tell you whether its way of thinking matches yours. And when a real affinity forms, the rest almost always finds a solution, budget included.
We live in a time when everything moves very fast. Publishing content, launching an advertising campaign, rolling out an activation: it has never been so easy to take action. So the temptation to start with the "what" is strong.
A brand strategy agency is defined precisely by what comes before: the "why". At DARE, we also create visual identities and their applications. But before designing anything, we need to understand the company, its field, its clients and what it wants people to feel. That understanding is what gives meaning to everything that follows, and it's why we consider that branding is first and foremost a matter of strategy.
One day, a large shopping centre contacted us about an urgent project: overhauling its entire brand, signage included, with delivery planned a month later. During the call, we realised it was a tender, and that each agency had one week to present the branding it imagined.
We declined. Creating an identity before meeting the client and understanding their context is a bit like giving answers without knowing the questions. The choice is then made on subjective criteria, like it or don't like it, whereas a brand isn't a work of art. It's a commercial tool and an asset for the company. Its first job isn't to please management, but to speak to target clients and trigger something specific in them: an emotion, a click, a purchase. A two-page brief isn't enough to understand all that.
That's why we don't propose any creative direction until a mandate is signed. On the other hand, we like to take the initiative in other ways. We sometimes spend several days analysing a company before a meeting, so we can arrive with a concrete reading of what we perceive from the outside. We prefer to understand first, and create afterwards.
Sending a tender to ten, twenty or thirty agencies is common practice, and it's understandable, especially for budget reasons. Yet we believe it's often more effective to start differently: meet one, two or three agencies face to face, as you would when recruiting, and take the time to understand their approach, their method, the way they see things and the projects they've carried out.
These meetings are best held in person. When we receive a request for a proposal by email, we always suggest meeting first, or at least talking by phone or video call. We believe strongly in technology, but we believe even more in people: shaking hands, seeing each other, sensing whether there's a connection. Branding is a matter of emotion, and choosing an agency without any emotion is unlikely to lead to a great collaboration.
That's also why we designed DARE as a brand in its own right, down to our offices, which are designed so that our clients feel what we stand for the moment they walk in. And when we ask our clients why they chose us, the answer we hear most often isn't competence, which other agencies have too. It's the experience we share, the feeling of forming a real team.
On the company side, senior management and the marketing team have every reason to take part in these meetings, since they will lead the project together. Once the work is underway, we also like to involve other profiles, such as long-standing employees or, on the contrary, newcomers, to understand how each of them perceives the brand.
It all depends on what you're looking for. A freelancer will generally be more affordable, but works alone and covers one specific skill. An agency brings several skills together under one roof, and large agencies often offer a wide range of them, which can be a real asset depending on your needs.
In our early days, we dreamed of growing into a very large team. Over time, we made a different choice: to remain a specialist team, a kind of commando focused on a single field, brand strategy, brand creation and rebranding. So we stopped video production, photography, motion design and social media content creation. This choice allows us to select our projects and commit to them fully. We know our work has a direct impact on the companies we support, and that our reputation depends on it.
A good collaboration starts with a clear proposal. At DARE, we provide a document that is as transparent as possible, detailing the method, the approach and the estimated time for each phase of the project. You know exactly what we are committing to, and what the budget corresponds to.
Another point is worth checking: who will own what is created. With us, the rule has been the same since day one: everything DARE creates for a client belongs 100% to that client.
We've been fortunate to work in many markets: London, Barcelona, Riga, France, Germany and Switzerland. We also regularly launch our own brands to test our ideas, rather than experimenting on our clients. One conviction came out of it: what works in France, England or the United States doesn't transfer as is to French-speaking Switzerland.
Romandy is a fascinating but demanding market. It's a small pond where everyone ends up knowing each other, closely or from afar. Know-how is valued as much as manners: respect, discretion, communication that informs without ever overselling. An agency that knows these codes from the inside will save you precious time and spare you a few missteps.
Choosing a branding agency ultimately means choosing who you'll think with about what your company wants to become. Take the time to meet, to listen and to feel. The right partner is the one with whom that thinking feels natural from the very first meeting.
30 minutes of honest conversation about your brand. No pitch, no sales, just a real discussion.
© 2026 DARE | Brand Factory
