Laddering? Not if you want clarity.

This idea created what will probably always be the third-worst workshop I have ever been involved in (I might be tempted to write about the other two another day). We'd been asked to work with another consultancy, who were leading this session but not open to collaboration. The most senior of them dramatically introduced a new technique that everybody in the room had heard of: laddering.

"It's important we do this, because we are ambitious for you" (inward groans) "and we want to encourage you to stretch your ambition" (mental searching for sick bags) "just like the world's greatest brands do" (silent "read the room" messages).

"Coca Cola," he educated us, "is actually an entertainment brand". The clients looked at the cans of entertainment on the table, and sat further away from them. For the next hour, the room was half-full of excited chatter about where this client's brand might stretch its ambition to. The other half, of course, was the client team, wondering where on Earth this was all leading.

The more rungs the conversation climbed, the further we moved away from the two critical questions in any brand strategy: Who are we for? What do we do for them?

I'm a fully paid-up believer that the most valuable and enduring brands are defined by an idea, not by a specific product or service. But that idea has to answer those two questions, for everyone involved in the brand - internal as well as external. We redefined an insurance business as a brand that created certainty; we expressed an accountancy institute as a brand that ensured "people can do business with confidence". Both built on an essential, demonstrable truth; both perhaps using the ladder in reverse, taking us to the core of the brand and its promise rather than stretching it to a point beyond recognition.

It's obvious why some people fall for this laddering stuff: consultants want to make everything as sexy as possible, and the herd rushes to whatever is felt to be the financial markets' buzz category of the time (remember "fintech"?). But, more often than not, it leads to nonsense. The key to a brand's sustained success is in understanding those two questions fully, and in being delighted to answer them constantly and consistently as conditions and expectations change.

The best creative work is always inspired by the tightest, clearest brief. The same is true for brand strategies.