If you’re a creative director long enough in this business, there will come a time when a brand transformation project lands on your desk.

Brand transformations become necessary when a brand has fallen on hard times.

Your brand may be a victim of sheer neglect, years of bad business decisions, an aging customer base or just plain bad luck, but it arrives with urgency and quite often with a degree of desperation.

Bring an old brand back from the dead and new clients will beat a path to your door.

Yet, transformations are tricky business. Unlike projects from fat-and-happy brands where you can just do more of what’s worked in the past, where there’s a comfort zone or a hot new product to put front and center, a brand that’s in trouble has an immediate need for change, a signal of hope, often forsaking the very things that made it successful in the first place.

It’s been my fate to work on a number of these transformations, first at BBDO on a seven-year roller coaster ride with the Apple account. This, at a time when it was still a computer company and every eighteen months was a cycle of glory-to-near-death-to-glory again.

It happened to me again at Ogilvy New York, when I joined the IBM account not long after that brand had experienced a swift fall from “Nobody got fired for buying you” to being declared Dinosaurus Obsoletus by the business media, a dire fate from which few brands return intact. (Ironically, Apple had always benchmarked itself against Big Blue and they both began a fall from grace around the same time, for completely different reasons.)

It happened to me most recently on Kodak, a defining brand of the 20th century that entered the 21st in a state of extreme peril.

As this is the CA Photography Annual, I think it’s an appropriate venue to tell the story of what we did and why we did it. The point isn’t just to recount the Kodak story, but to offer pointers on the particular creative problems posed by brands-in-transition.

Keep in mind, it’s very hard for any brand to stay on top for even a decade. New competitors emerge. Consumers get bored with you. The finance men start chipping away at what made you special in the first place.

Kodak managed to define their category and stay at the top of it not for a decade, or two decades, but for more than a century. It was a stunning record of global growth and success.

Still, as the ’90s came to a conclusion, the digitalization wave that had transformed computing and communication came knocking at Kodak’s door. They knew it was coming. But it hit with a speed and intensity no one could have anticipated.

By the fall of 2002, a flood of cheap, digital cameras caused film sales to decline precipitously. And with the decline of film came the decline of film-processing and film-printing.

It was a billion-dollar market change and the pundits who declare such things declared Kodak a film company, and therefore, a dinosaur.

When this kind of situation hits your brand, it feels like you can do nothing right. Like your past is something to be disowned. There is a natural tendency to throw out everything and start from scratch.

For a company like Kodak, that would mean disavowing a century of advertising clichés and conventions that we all take for granted, but that Kodak had pretty much invented. Mothers and babies. Daddy’s little girl. Puppies and kittens. The power of memories and events. The Kodak Moment was, and is, a part of our culture.

The new competition, meanwhile, was sleek and new and had origins in Silicon Valley high tech and the slickest Japanese consumer electronics: Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Canon, not to mention cellphones and laptops and the Internet. These were the new competition. They were all about digital things like software and pixels. Kodak, by comparison, seemed quaint and sepia-toned.

Ironically, Kodak actually invented much of the technology of digital photography. Nearly all digital cameras take advantage of Kodak patents and innovations. It was painful for Kodak because they received no credit for inventing the products that now appeared to be making them obsolete.

Meanwhile, splashy competitors like HP were doing award-winning campaigns that were slick and brilliantly executed. The music was hip, the attitude was cool. What was Kodak to do?

The natural tendency in a situation like this is to disavow everything about your brand, to inject your work with shovels full of style, edge, attitude, to do exactly the thing that feels most unlike yourself.

On the face of it, this makes perfect sense. If people think of you as X, you behave as Y. Common sense, no?

Personally, I think it can be a trap.