Engagement Focus:

Brand Strategy • Stakeholder Alignment

The Challenge

Our client understood the importance of defining LIPA’s brand and had brought us in to help do it. This wasn’t simply an exercise in developing new marketing messages or changing the organization’s visual identity. The goal was to establish a strategic foundation for how LIPA understood itself, communicated its role, and presented itself to its many stakeholders.

That work was particularly relevant because larger questions were being considered about LIPA’s future and the kind of organization it could become. Questions about purpose, positioning, identity, and reputation weren’t peripheral communications issues. They were connected to the organization’s strategic direction.

Our five-hour session was designed to begin answering those questions.

But shortly after we started talking with the additional stakeholders our client had invited into the room, a more fundamental problem became apparent.

They Weren’t Ready to Build the Brand

Before an organization can agree on its brand, its leadership needs to understand what a brand actually is, why it matters, and what having a clearly defined one makes possible.

That alignment wasn’t there yet.

Our client understood what he was trying to accomplish, but the broader organization wasn’t ready to participate meaningfully in the process. Trying to push ahead with our planned workshop might have produced answers to the questions on our agenda, but it wouldn’t have produced the organizational understanding and support necessary to make those answers useful.

So we had a choice.

We could run the five-hour workshop we’d been hired and flown to New York to conduct.

Or we could address the problem that was actually sitting in front of us.

We changed the agenda.

From Brand Workshop to Strategic Roadmap

Instead of asking, “What should LIPA’s brand be?” we began working through a different question:

What needs to happen before LIPA is ready to answer that question?

The brand strategy session became a communications strategy and roadmapping session.

Together, we began identifying the conversations, education, executive engagement, and stakeholder buy-in that would need to occur before the organization could successfully define and adopt a meaningful brand position.

The objective had changed from developing the brand to creating the conditions necessary for the organization to develop one.

That distinction mattered.

A consultant can follow a process and produce a document. But a Brand Playbook that nobody understands, believes in, or uses isn’t a strategy. It’s just a document.

The organization needed alignment before it needed answers.

Building the Tools for Consensus

Our work continued after we returned home.

Through a series of virtual working sessions, we developed the Brand Playbook with our client, including LIPA’s purpose, values, vision, mission, positioning, brand image statement, key messages, talking points, proof points, and messaging guidance.

But the role of the Playbook had changed.

Rather than simply being the end product of a brand-development exercise, it became a tool our client could use as part of the larger consensus-building effort. It helped make the idea of “brand” tangible and provided a framework for conversations about what LIPA was, what it could become, and how it should communicate that direction.

At the same time, my role increasingly became that of an advisor.

I worked with our client to help articulate what brand meant in this context, connect it to the larger strategic questions facing the organization, and think through how to make the case for the work as the conversation moved through management and leadership.

The value of the engagement wasn’t limited to the Playbook we were developing. It was also the outside perspective helping our client determine how to move the idea forward.

The Strategy Before the Strategy

It’s tempting to think that good consulting means having a proven process and executing it consistently.

Experience has taught me something slightly different.

A process is useful until the situation tells you that you need a different process.

We could have conducted the workshop we had planned. We could have filled whiteboards, answered questions, synthesized the discussion, and delivered a polished Brand Playbook. Technically, we would have fulfilled the assignment.

But it wouldn’t have solved the real problem.

The more important strategic decision was recognizing that LIPA wasn’t ready for the engagement it had hired us to deliver and changing course while we were in the room.

Before the organization could define its brand, it needed greater clarity about why defining that brand mattered.

Sometimes clarity is the outcome of strategy.

Sometimes it’s the prerequisite for strategy.

Today, We’d Call It BrandTherapy

At the time, we simply thought of this as doing what the engagement required.

Today, I have a name for this kind of work: BrandTherapy.

BrandTherapy is experienced outside perspective for leaders who need to make sense of an important brand, marketing, or business challenge before committing to what comes next.

Sometimes that means answering the question a client brings into the room. Sometimes it means recognizing that there’s another question that needs to be answered first.

The value we brought to LIPA wasn’t simply our methodology or the Brand Playbook we developed. It was recognizing that the problem we’d been hired to solve wasn’t yet the problem the organization was ready to solve, changing course, and helping our client create a path forward.

That’s what I mean by clarity before commitment.