Let me tell you about the moment I almost lost a room.
I was presenting brand strategy to a leadership team inside a $27 billion health system. Smart people. Experienced people. People who had devoted their careers to mission-driven work and were genuinely proud of it.
I showed them what their target audience – the physicians they were trying to recruit – actually said about them.
The room got very quiet.
Then, eventually, slowly, it got curious.
That progression from defense to curiosity is something every CEO and CMO navigates when they’re trying to move a new initiative through an organization. And most of them are completely unprepared for it.
20+ years of brand strategy inside some of the most complex organizations in the world will teach you a few things. One of them is this:
Your strategy is important. But it’s nothing if you don’t have trust.
When a brand initiative stalls – when a new direction gets watered down in committee, or leadership alignment is perpetually one meeting away, or the work comes back from legal looking nothing like what you intended – it’s almost never because the strategy was wrong.
It’s because the people responsible for executing it don’t believe in it yet, and nobody has done the work of getting them there.
That work has a name. It’s called stakeholder alignment. And it is, without question, the hardest and most underestimated part of any major brand initiative.
Most CEOs and CMOs understand alignment in theory. Get people in the room. Share the vision. Build consensus. Move forward.
What they’re less prepared for is the emotional reality of what happens when you ask people to change the story they’ve been telling about themselves.
Because that’s what a brand initiative actually is. It’s not just a marketing decision. It’s a challenge to identity. To legacy. To the way people understand their own purpose and contribution.
When you walk into a room and say “the way we’ve been showing up isn’t working,” you are not delivering a strategic observation. You are telling a room full of people that something they care about (something they’ve built, protected, and believed in) isn’t landing the way they thought it was.
And people do not always receive that information cleanly. Even smart ones. I mean, would you?
Even ones who know, intellectually, that brand strategy is about the audience and not the organization, have a tendency to internalize this as criticism.
They get quiet. Sometimes, they get a little defensive. Then, if you do this right, curious.
Your job as the exec is to move them through that progression without losing them.
When stakeholders can’t get behind a new direction, it is almost always because the trust isn’t there yet.
That includes trust that the new direction won’t betray what the organization actually stands for, trust that “change” doesn’t mean “abandon,” and trust that you understand what matters to them (and you’re not asking them to give it up.)
Until that trust exists, your best strategy will keep hitting the same wall.
This is true across industries. I’ve watched it happen with mission-driven healthcare organizations where the brand identity was inseparable from the moral identity.
But I’ve also seen it happen at global consumer brands where the legacy was so strong it had become a cage, and at growth-stage companies where the founding team couldn’t agree on who they were becoming.
Different rooms. Same problem.
The trust is the issue, and trust is not built with a better deck.
The way to fix this is with a reframe – not a new strategy or even new data.
What you need to do is show the team that you’re asking them to look at things a different way.
Which is a lot easier than asking them to change who they are.
In the healthcare example, the reframe was this: the mission isn’t the problem. The mission is the product. It’s important, and you’re right to have spent so much time on it.
What isn’t working is the packaging. And packaging can be changed without anyone having to feel like they sold out.
The moment that landed was the moment I had the buy-in. Because suddenly the question wasn’t, “are we abandoning who we are?” It was, “how do we make sure who we are actually gets through to the people who need to hear it?”
That’s a question an organization can get excited about.
Your reframe will be different. But the structure is the same: find the thing people are protecting, honor it explicitly, and separate it from the thing that actually needs to change.
When you do that, you get rid of any lingering defensiveness in favor of curiosity. And curiosity is where the real work can finally begin.
If you’re a CEO or CMO preparing to move a significant brand or positioning initiative through your organization, this is what I want you to know before you walk into that room:
It is a progression that happens over time, and trying to accelerate it by skipping steps will cost you more time than it saves. Plan for the emotional arc. Write it into your strategy. It’s part of the deal.
When someone pushes back hard on a brand direction, listen for what’s underneath it. It’s almost always about identity, legacy, or fear. Address that directly and the strategic objection usually dissolves. And, check yourself: are you asking for a foundational change of identity? And have you earned the right to ask for that?
Facts presented without emotional context don’t land in rooms where people’s identities are invested. Lead with the human truth, then support it with the data. Not the other way around.
What is the thing this room is protecting? What would it mean to them if you could honor that thing while still moving forward? Know your answer to that question before you need it. Because you will need it.
You cannot let the facts get negotiated away. That’s how you end up with a watered-down strategy that pleases everyone and moves no one. But you also can’t present hard truths like a battering ram. The goal is to make the truth approachable, not palatable. There’s a difference. Decide what the non-negotiables are, and stick to them.
Every major brand initiative I’ve led has produced results I’m proud of. But the numbers – (traffic lift, impression count, revenue impact) those are the output.
The work was in the room – messy, emotional, people work. Teams of smart, committed, invested humans had to learn to see themselves the way their audience saw them.
So, we built trust over multiple meetings, through honesty that was delivered with enough care that people could actually receive it.
That’s the hardest part of brand strategy. It’s also the part that determines whether any of the rest of it works.
So before you finalize the deck, before you schedule the big presentation, before you do anything else, ask yourself one question:
Have I done the work to make this room ready to hear what I’m about to tell them?
If the answer is no, start there.
Everything else can wait.
Gina Clementi is a brand strategist with 20+ years building brand narratives for organizations ranging from Nike and adidas to Providence Health and Micron. She writes about brand, story, and the gap between the two at GOODSTORY.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.