What a billion-dollar consumer business spends on its brand programme, and where Trueness fits
Owner: Claude. Status: first draft, 25 October 2026. Purpose: re-anchor Trueness's pricing and ambition against the real annual spend of the buyer it is for: consumer businesses with roughly $1bn or more of revenue, running a brand transformation or a continuous brand programme with an integrated agency. Source: one such organisation's 2026 and 2027 agency scopes, budget workbooks and research recap, observed confidentially. The organisation and its agencies are not named; figures are rounded; the exact figures and source references are kept outside the repo in .private/price-source-log.md.
A. Observed programme spend (rounded ranges)
A consumer business of roughly $1bn revenue running a brand programme with an integrated agency, observed in 2026 and 2027 planning:
- Total agency relationship including working media: $30–40m a year.
- Agency fees excluding media: $10–15m a year, with the owner trying to hold non-working spend under $15m.
- Creative agency fees: $7–10m a year plus about $1.7m of production.
- One-off brand strategy work (positioning, benefit ladder, segmentation, territories, audience planning, creative platform): about $1.5m across a year of refresh.
- Individual strategy workstreams (CRM strategy, creator strategy, marketing mix modelling, SEO): $0.2–0.4m each.
- Brand health tracker: $0.2–0.4m a year across four markets.
- Research: three to four quantitative studies a year at $50–80k each, qualitative rounds at $20–40k, two DIY testing platforms at about $110k together, and a six-figure user-testing programme; fifteen research sources in six months.
- UX and product-management agency: about $1.2m a year, falling as AI delivery partners take the work at $0.5m fixed plus $1–2m at risk.
- Total direct-to-consumer marketing plan: $55–60m, up about 15% year on year.
The owner's own description of reaching a single brand decision: "half a million dollars of customer research, a brand agency and thousands of internal loops".
B. What this says about the buyer
- The unit of procurement is a workstream at $0.2–0.5m or a programme at $1m+, not a study. A $15k audit is below the threshold at which a VP-level buyer engages; it would be bought, if at all, by a research manager out of petty budget and would never reach the decisions that matter.
- Research is already a seven-figure line when agency research attendance, segmentation, trackers, studies and user testing are added together, and the owner was consciously trying to cut agency non-working cost while increasing research and validation. Money is moving from agency production toward evidence.
- The brand team's complaint was not the cost of research but its speed and its disconnection: fifteen sources in six months, each a deck in a SharePoint, no way to question them, and every new decision needing a new field study. The synthetic panel they built themselves answered the speed problem in two weeks and then raised the trust problem. That sequence is the Trueness sales conversation.
- At this scale the buyer already has a research lead, a brand agency, a media agency, an AI delivery partner and a value-creation consultancy in the room. Trueness enters as the evidence layer those parties test their work against, not as a tool one of them buys.
- The owner's non-working ceiling ($14.6m) is the budget Trueness competes inside. A $0.6–1.2m programme is 4–8% of that ceiling and replaces or compresses several existing lines: part of the tracker, most ad-hoc testing, the DIY platforms, and a share of agency strategy fees that today buy opinion.
C. Comparable enterprise price points in the category
| What | Price | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Simile enterprise simulation | est. $100–250k+ a year | third-party estimate |
| Aaru enterprise | not published; consulting-channel engagements | aaru.com, press |
| Evidenza managed engagement | est. $50–100k+ per engagement | third-party estimate |
| Kantar LINK AI | inside enterprise research contracts | kantar.com |
| Brand health tracker, four markets | $0.17–0.43m a year | observed quotes |
| Segmentation and positioning programme (agency) | $0.4–1.5m one-off | observed |
| Strategy workstream (CRM, creator, MMM) | $0.2–0.4m | observed |
| Management consultancy value-creation research | seven figures | observed, not itemised |
The enterprise simulators have not published prices because they sell at this level already. Trueness should not undercut them; it should price as the evidence layer above them.
D. Implication for Trueness pricing (proposal to strategy/ and finance/)
| Offer | Scope | Price (USD) | Anchor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise Audit | Every synthetic audience a brand and its agencies use (vendor and in-house), up to 3 markets, fresh human holdouts per audience and market, consolidated Calibration Records, board-ready read | $75–150k, 6–8 weeks | One quant A&U study plus one qual round, or one agency strategy workstream |
| Trueness Programme, Foundation | 3 audiences, 2 markets, quarterly human waves (~1,000 completes per market per wave plus interviews), Calibration Records kept current, web, API and MCP access for the brand and its agencies | $600k a year | One and a half brand trackers; a quarter of one-off brand-strategy work |
| Trueness Programme, Enterprise | 6 audiences, 4 markets, continuous human calibration, named research lead, quarterly board read, agency enablement | $1.2m a year | One CRM-plus-MMM-plus-tracker budget |
| Trueness Programme, Group | Multi-brand portfolio, shared audiences across brands, regional markets | $2.5m+ a year | A fraction of the agency non-working ceiling |
| Agency and consultancy licence | Run Trueness audits and programmes for their clients under the Calibration Record standard | Licence plus revenue share | Holding companies resell simulation today |
Direct cost per Foundation programme: four waves times two markets at $20–30 per complete plus interviews and moderation is roughly $150–300k of fieldwork a year, plus half a research lead, an external reviewer and $10–20k of model usage. Target gross margin 55–65%. This is a delivery organisation with a research bench, not a solo operator with scripts.
E. Why the previous plan was too small
The first draft priced for the buyer who already uses a $12,500 synthetic tool and wants to know if it is wrong. That buyer exists, but the money, the decisions and the reputational stakes sit with the brand that spends $30m a year with an agency and $1.5m on strategy before a campaign ships. The reference organisation would not have noticed a $35k engagement; it would have bought a $0.6m one in the same breath as a tracker, and it would have expected the provider to be in the room with the agency. The plan now targets that room.