Anyone used a Branding Agency or similar?

[Rabotnik]

The crowdsourcing route seems like a winner. I was looking at this when I was getting my cards done, but I ended going with logoonlinepros.co.uk since they were slightly cheaper. Huge mistake - they barely understood English, and communication was terrible. I think they were actually using cheap labour in India, since the rep I emailed mistakenly replied to me with an email intended for his internal lackeys and I saw their names.

[malvolio]

PM Sent...

[Old Greg]

Mate of mine got the venture capitalists in for his Plan B.

[SimonMac]

I have a friend who works for such organisation, would be happy to pass on their details to you, if your interested DM Me

[yasockie]

Hi.

I have had the whole Visual Identity thing done by a team of a Graphic Designer and a HTML&CSS guy.
Now I have business cards, logo, website and papeteria all in a consisten style and identity.
I knew exactly what I was after and who to engage and I am happy with results, it has brought me the ability to handout good looking business cards and brought organic traffic to the website and altogether indirectly, or even directly contributed to the growth of my business.
I also feel much better knowing my business appears professional when people see it for the first time - having a website alone is so much better than so many Ltds out there, even mid-size ones.

[Murder1]

This is something I had in my head to do when I had some more spare time.

As this spare time never seems to materialise I think I'll be looking at something like designcrowd as has already been mentioned.

[Scoobos]

I cannot rate Open Source Logo Design | DesignCrowd highly enough

It's worth a look and a snip of the price of getting a branding company to do it. You also get the benefit of deciding among many different people's attempts, rather than the 2 or 3 you'll get from an agency.

[GillsMan]

As I continue my move from bum-on-seat contractor to proper company, I realise I need to engage the use of a branding agency. I've got a new product I want to sell to companies, I think it's quite exciting, and the interest I've received so far is pretty huge.

Now, to market it, I think I need to call in the professionals. I've worked on a website, but it looks a bit naff. I kind of need help with the brand identity of the product as well, and I'm open to the idea of changing my company's own logo.

I just want to concentrate on developing the stuff that I develop and leave the branding to the professionals. I've struggled to brand this for a while and I realise I'm wasting too much time on it. I recognise that brand is important.

So, has anyone called in the branding experts before? What was your experience? Were the costs prohibitive? Googling tends to reveal agencies that are really geared towards medium and large enterprises.

Feel free to hawk your own services to me if this is something you do.

Thanks!