• by Julia Beardwood , March 17, 2011

It is a dramatic moment in "The King's Speech" when Lionel Logue, an Australian speech therapist, declares "My castle, my rules" to his stammering new patient. The king is visibly shocked. How dare a commoner set rules for him? Logue insists and the king begrudgingly agrees to Logue's terms -- ones that will take him far out of his comfort zone.

Like Logue, I am a service provider and sometimes affectionately referred to as a brand therapist. My role is to fix peoples' problems -- their branding problems. It always surprises me how often these successful, capable people have deeply rooted mindsets that hold them back from making real breakthroughs for their business. While "treating brands" is different from treating people, effective "treatment" is unlikely to happen without some level of discomfort on the part of the brand manager, just as the king experienced.

The movie brilliantly dramatizes three foundational pillars of a professional relationship that produces results, which is after all what everyone wants -- whether it's speaking clearly or brand differentiation.

Pillar #1. "My Castle, My Rules."

When a client walks through your door of your castle -- establish your authority early on. The start of any relationship is the time to set the ground rules for partnership. We provide clients with a "Partnership Commitment" that describes what they can expect from us and what we expect from them. The client side of the commitment kicks off with "An open mind to new ideas" and "Bravery to make the right decisions, not just the easy ones." It may not be perfect, and other approaches may work just as well, but putting "rules" in writing gets the conversation underway and helps nip potential bad habits in the bud.

Pillar #2. "Be a Rock, Not a Tree."

Don't get blown around by the wind. Apply warrior-like focus to the factors that will achieve the client's goals, fending off distractions and dilly-dallying. Logue asked for more time on repetitive exercises than the king would have liked, while persuading him to ignore inane suggestions coming from supposedly more qualified physicians. In the course of a branding project, unexpected issues and opinions arrive in waves, draining hours, energy and morale, potentially taking the project completely off the rails. It's crucial to draw the line and command attention back to the original objectives. Defining those objectives in a few crisp words at the outset (rather than a two-page memo) makes it easy to say "remember that our goals here are A, B and C, and this issue has absolutely nothing to do with getting us there."

Pillar #3. "Comfort with Discomfort."

This is perhaps the most challenging. However, much as clients say they want to be challenged, they have an innate tendency to stick to their old habits. Yet it's the willingness to venture into uncomfortable territory that will ultimately achieve exceptional results.

In the movie, Logue understood that the root of the king's problems were psychological, not physical. Logue urged him to "find his voice" -- both as a speaker and as a king -- but that required setting aside a lifetime of fear and self-doubt. Like many tired old brands, the king was suffering from bad habits.

For our clients, words are the comfort zone they use to express ideas. But designers think in pictures -- not to mention that regular people absorb information visually -- and visual ideas are what we produce. To get clients out of the verbal zone and into the visual zone, we use an imaging exercise to turn written ideas into visual ones. We build our creative brief together using pictures (and just a few words). Through this process, we get to debate fine points like "What does authenticity look like?" This method offers a much richer way to inform great work beyond the word "authentic" on a brief. The experience is refreshingly different, although some find it disconcerting. Nonetheless, the results it yields are always appreciated.

Lionel Logue proved himself the master of his realm, and the king thanked him for it. Now if only we had the opportunity to get clients to say, "I am a thistle-sifter. I have a sieve of sifted thistles and a sieve of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter." It's a triumph that makes you smile every time because it's exactly the desired result.