Name Brand

Ever get an inquiry from someone who loves your work… and then discover their budget is a fraction of your starting price? 😅

Or maybe you're on the other side of that conversation, trying to figure out what professional branding or website design costs before you reach out to someone.

There's a lot of confusion around pricing in the creative industry, and I think we could all benefit from talking about it a little more openly.

In this episode, I'm digging into why creative professionals sometimes receive inquiries that don't align with their rates, what your website and marketing might be communicating to potential clients, and how to handle those conversations without making anyone feel bad about their budget.

I'm also sharing what goes into different levels of branding, website design, and SEO services at Sunday Muse, along with my current starting prices.

In this episode, we're talking about:

• Why someone's idea of a small budget might be a significant investment for them
• What your website, portfolio, and messaging could be communicating about your pricing
• Whether sharing starting prices on your website can help potential clients make informed decisions
• What different levels of professional brand identity design include
• Why website design quotes can vary so much, especially for Shopify projects
• How to respond when someone's budget falls below your starting price
• When it might make sense to start with a brand or visibility assessment

If you're considering a branding or website project and aren't sure where to begin, I talk about a few different ways we can work together in this episode.

You can also explore my services and current starting prices on the Sunday Muse website.

Love the sound of human-first customer experiences and want to make them your competitive advantage? Then add What Would They Do?, The Customer Experience Podcast for Online Business Owners by my biz buddy Nadine Nethery to your weekly podcast rotation. Every week, she shares practical tips and interviews expert guests so you walk away with no-fluff answers to your burning customer experience questions. Each strategy achievable without expensive tech tools or lavish corporate budgets! Hit up the link in the shownotes and tune in next.

Listen to What Would They Do?

I talked about how much I love my email list in this episode. Come see what kind of fun we’re having over there.

You open Instagram for five minutes and suddenly you're questioning your entire marketing strategy because someone said you NEED to be doing something you've barely thought about before.

I have a lot of questions about that.

And lately, I've been thinking about how much marketing we're all consuming while trying to market our own businesses. Especially now that AI makes it easier than ever to produce more content.

In this episode, we're getting into how I evaluate marketing advice before recommending it to a client, why I think specificity is so valuable when creating content, and what happens when every business is trying to get someone's attention at the same time.

I'm also sharing a recent discovery from client competitor research that turned into a piece of content, because I think it's a great example of finding marketing ideas through the work you're already doing.

If you've ever saved a marketing tip and immediately wondered whether you should change your strategy, I think you'll enjoy this conversation.

Erin from Lunimae

Erin helps established brand and web design studio founders increase profit margins and capacity through operational support. Her long-term OBM retainers and six-month Handoff help founders spend less time managing day-to-day admin and more time focusing on strategic growth.

Work with Erin: http://www.lunimae.com/services

Sam from Nomad Copy Agency

Sam is the founder and lead copywriter at Nomad Copy Agency, where she creates website copy, sales pages, and sales emails tailored to each business's voice and conversion goals.

She also has a comprehensive resource called Every Launch Email You Need.

Grab it at www.nomadcopyagency.com/launchemails and use code SUNDAY to get it for $1.

Join my email list that I LOVE https://www.sundaymusedesign.com/newsletter 

Have you ever stopped yourself from posting something because you were positive you’d already talked about it to death… only to realize you mentioned it once six months ago?

When you run the business, you spend a ridiculous amount of time with your own marketing. You wrote the email. You made the post. You’ve read your homepage more times than any reasonable person ever will. So your sense of what feels repetitive gets a little warped.

In this episode of Name Brand, Shannon digs into how long it can take for people to remember what you do and why we’re often ready to change things long before they’ve had much time to stick. She also gets into the temptation to keep finding new ways to describe your business, what happens when you get used to your own brand, and why watching everyone else launch shiny new things can make perfectly good marketing suddenly feel old.

And because sometimes a brand really has run its course, Shannon also talks about what she looks at when someone comes to Sunday Muse ready for a change.

If you’ve ever thought, “I swear I’ve said this a million times,” go check. You might be surprised.

Mentioned in this episode:
Episode 1.4 | What It Means When Your Brand Feels Stale

Go read your old client emails.

Somewhere in there, a client probably described your business in a way you never would. She remembered the way you handled something, told a story about working with you, or put words to a strength that has become so ordinary to you that you barely notice it anymore.

That language is useful because your clients are giving you evidence of what they remember about your business.

I started thinking about this after studying the language across 35 luxury wedding planner websites. “Luxury” appeared 16 times. “Seamless” appeared 12. “Dream,” 11. “Unforgettable,” nine. “Curated,” seven.

Spend enough time inside an industry and you learn its vocabulary. Eventually, certain words simply sound like the words a business like yours is supposed to use.

Your clients have another vocabulary.

In this episode, we’re looking at what their emails, testimonials, referrals, texts, and stories can tell you about the associations your business is already creating—and how to spot the specific details and repeated ideas worth paying attention to.

Give yourself an hour this week, pull together a handful of old client messages, and read them with your brand in mind.

There may be a great line for your website sitting in there. There may also be an association worth building an entire brand around.

Mentioned in this episode: The Sunday Files, Case No. 01.

Get The Sunday Files sundaymusedesign.com/sundayfiles

“It feels stale.”

“I’ve kind of frankensteined my website.”

“It’s so outdated.”

“I’m bored of it.”

I hear versions of these sentences all the time from business owners who know something feels off and have a hard time explaining what changed.

Once you can describe the change in your business, you can make a much better decision about what your brand needs.

In this episode, I’m breaking down what “stale” tends to mean when I hear it from clients, including an old service still leading the brand, pricing that has moved beyond the signals around it, and a website still speaking to an earlier audience.

I’ll also give you one sentence you can use to figure out what has changed:

My website was built when I was ______, and now I’m ______.

The distance between those two answers tells you a lot.

And sometimes you’ll discover that the business still fits the brand perfectly well. You’ve simply looked at the thing more than any other human being alive. That calls for a much smaller solution.

Explore Sunday Snapshot

Get The Sunday Files

Before Sunday Muse, I owned a wedding planning business, which meant I spent years recommending other vendors.

When I really loved someone, I sold them. I’d tell a bride why she needed to call this photographer or that florist, give her the story, and watch her pull out her phone to look them up.

Sometimes I could practically watch the momentum disappear.

That experience taught me something I think about constantly now that I design websites: a referral can arrive at your website with a story about you already in her head.

Your website gets to continue that story.

In this episode, we’re looking at the referral handoff: what happens between “Oh my gosh, I have someone for you” and the moment that person decides whether to reach out.

I’ll walk you through the small things that can make that handoff easier, from being immediately recognizable to showing current proof of your caliber and making the inquiry process easy to find and use.

And there’s a simple test you can run on your own website: send someone there without telling her what you’re testing, ask her to contact you, and watch where she hesitates.

Explore Sunday Snapshot

Get The Sunday Files

Before I was a brand strategist, I taught writing and rhetoric, and there was one question I wrote in the margins of student papers constantly:

What are you arguing?

Years later, I realized I still ask essentially the same question when I look at websites.

Every website is making a case for something through what it includes, what it emphasizes, what it proves, and who it seems to be talking to.

You get to decide whether that case represents the business you run now.

In this episode, I’m borrowing a framework from my teaching days and applying it to your website: the claim you’re making, the evidence supporting it, and the audience receiving it.

We’re also getting into the weird way websites accumulate old versions of a business over time. An outdated portfolio, an old offer that still gets prime real estate, a testimonial from work you’d never take today—good things can become evidence for a business you’ve already outgrown.

Once you know what your website is arguing, it becomes much easier to see what belongs there.

Mentioned in this episode: Sunday Strategy and The Sunday Files, Case No. 01.

Explore Sunday Snapshot

Get The Sunday Files

I played spot-the-difference with 35 luxury wedding planner websites. Somewhere around website nineteen, I genuinely couldn’t tell whether I’d already looked at it.

So I started counting.

For the first edition of The Sunday Files, I studied 35 luxury wedding planner websites across five markets and looked at the same things on every one: colors, typography, logos, imagery, headlines, language, naming, and taglines.

The patterns were hard to miss. All 35 use white or something very close to it. Three accent colors account for 30 of the 35 brands. “Luxury” appears on 16 homepages, “seamless” on 12, and “dream” on 11.

The more interesting question is how 35 very good businesses ended up making so many of the same decisions.

In this episode, I’m getting into what happens when everyone in an industry does the responsible thing and researches everyone else, the language businesses reach for when they’re trying to sound different, and what the most recognizable names in the group do differently.

Because this is a wedding planner study, but it’s very much an everybody problem.

Mentioned in this episode: The Sunday Files, Case No. 01. I put the full research, counts, patterns, and findings into a free case file you can read alongside your own website.

Get The Sunday Files: sundaymusedesign.com/sundayfiles

You know that business in your industry whose name just…comes up?

Someone asks who they should hire, where they should go, or whose work they should look at, and people already know the name.

That’s what Name Brand is about.

I’m Shannon Pruitt, founder and brand strategist at Sunday Muse Design®, and every week we’re going to look at what makes a business easier to know, remember, trust, and ask for by name.

We’ll talk about branding, websites, marketing, reputation, buyer perception, and the weird habits entire industries pick up because everybody is looking at everybody else. Some episodes will start with research, some with something I’ve noticed in the wild, and some with a question you can take straight back to your own business.

Because building a recognizable business comes down to understanding what people are seeing, hearing, remembering, and saying about you—and making thoughtful decisions from there.

If you’re very good at what you do and you’re ready for your brand to make that a little more obvious, you’re in the right place.

Follow Name Brand and start with Episode 1.