A good brand consultancy gives you a genuinely sharp read. It costs tens of thousands of dollars, takes weeks, and describes a brand that keeps moving the day the deck is delivered.
| Dimension | Brand consultancy | Creative Cortex |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $25,000 to $50,000 per engagement. | From $24 a month. $179 runs ten brands. First fifty reads free. |
| Time to first insight | Weeks of discovery, interviews, and workshops. | About five minutes after your first drop. |
| Freshness | A snapshot. Stale within weeks of delivery. | Refreshed continuously. The read moves when the brand moves. |
| Coverage | A sample of your content, chosen for the deck. | Every photo you own, individually. |
| The record | One dated document. | A permanent, dated series. Drift becomes evidence, not recollection. |
| Day-to-day usefulness | Strategy-level guidance your team must translate. | A verdict per photo: post it, where, with what caption, or skip it. |
Naming, repositioning, a founding identity built from nothing: that is strategy work, and a strong consultancy earns its fee doing it. Creative Cortex does not do strategy workshops and does not pretend to.
The consultancy's read is right on delivery day and decays from there, and almost no one re-buys the engagement annually. So the operating year, when your team posts every day and the brand actually moves, runs unwatched. That is the gap Creative Cortex sits in: the continuous read, at a price that makes running it all year unremarkable. Many teams sensibly do both: the consultancy to set the direction, Creative Cortex to hold it.
Work email. Fifty images. Five minutes.