Fear not. An army of consultants stands at the ready, eager to uncover your mission and vision, anxious to apply the time-tested techniques of Fortune 500 brand building to corporate identity in the digital space.

And what are those techniques? In the dark, pre-dot-com days, corporate executives suffering a brand-identity crisis would spend the day holed up in a sterile conference room at the Marriott Marquis, armed only with pens, notebooks and a sweating pitcher of ice water. But these days, execs are making a conscious effort to lighten up. Mindful of Fast Company's injunction that in the Internet age, the competitive edge will go to "those with a sense of exploration and playfulness," CEOs are adopting furry mascots, hopping around on pogo sticks, even creating "mirth committees" to monitor fluctuations in their organization's "happy quotient." All of this managed cheer is supposed to stoke team spirit, refine a business model, even reveal the "brand essence" -- that sparkly pebble of meaning that lies at the heart of a brand.

At seminars, retreats and executive off-sites, a playful new ethos is taking hold. "We actually hired mimes," confesses Lon Fialla, vice president of corporate communications at PeopleSoft, a business-management software maker. "We wanted our employees to spend a day really reflecting on what we're all about. But we also wanted to keep them awake and entertained." The solution, she says, was to hire a troupe of mummers. "Jugglers," Fialla marvels. "Dancers. Stilt walkers. They were extremely creative and flexible ... They had costumes lit up with lights ... One woman was a fluttering bird moving through the auditorium. Another gentleman came through on a shoe."

Fialla confirms something I'd heard from a few bemused PeopleSoft employees -- that the mimes were actually encouraged to interact with the presenters onstage. "One of the things I know about working with mimes is that they don't detract, as long as they're focusing attention on who's speaking," Fialla assures me. When it came time for Craig Conway, PeopleSoft's CEO, to speak, "I had two mimes working with him," Fialla says. "If he was referring to a slide, they were pointing to it." While Conway seemed nonplussed at first, "as the day went by, he got more comfortable interacting with them," Fialla says. "Our CEO is extremely strong, extremely charismatic."

The results, Fialla says, were eye-opening. The mimes "helped us break through some of our old assumptions," he says eagerly. "We came away with a whole new understanding of what we do as a business."

While mimes produce indisputably fertile results, there are also corporate hypnotists, who will find traces of lost brand equity in the middle-management subconscious. Then there is Face the Music, a "collection of consultants and musicians" who, for a sizable fee, will compose a blues ballad about your brand's difficulties. According to Fast Company, clients include Con Ed and Bell Atlantic.

And now, say hello to On Your Feet, a Portland-based consultancy that rehabilitates brands through improvisational comedy. Gary Hirsch, who heads the group, promotes improv as a metaphor for the new-economy manager, who must be nimble, flexible, able to cope with change in midstream. "In a network economy, what matters most is the ability to improvise," Hirsch told me when I met him in San Francisco recently.

It's easy to see how a dose of improv would be a treat for addled brand managers, a welcome respite from a day spent negotiating licenses and poring over budget spreadsheets. And indeed, Hirsch's promotional material brims with blurbs from blue-chip clients, from Audi to Starbucks to Southwest Airlines. Particularly appreciated is that fact that, unlike its presumptive competitors, OYF takes a businesslike approach to fun. "I've worked with improv groups on two prior occasions and felt that they were too fluffy, in that we didn't end up with any actionable outcomes," writes David Waluk, vice president of international and prestige brands for spirits giant Allied Domecq. "With On Your Feet, I felt like I could relax ... I could tell that we were going to end up with something that would really benefit the brand." Jerome Conlin, former vice president of customer insights and brand planning for Starbucks, is also a fan, describing his encounter with Hirsch as nothing less than "inspiring." Of his work-over of the Starbucks team, the modest Hirsch will say only that "the customer-barista interaction was a story waiting to be retold."

To witness Hirsch's nonfluffy techniques in action, I was invited to attend an all-day workshop with teen Web site Kibu, a digital lifestyle brand for the sparkly-nail-polish set. What was Kibu? As with so many dot-com upstarts chasing big money and even bigger odds, no one at the company seemed quite able to say. On the one hand, Kibu was up to something richly virtuous, "bringing together girls' interests with all kinds of digital tools," providing them with "fun, uninhibited, fresh perspectives on everything they care about." And if those interests and perspectives also happened to "seed product," "showcase merchandise" and "drive girls to retail," well, so much the better. For Kibu, in addition to being a vessel of teen spirit, was also an "online integrated marketing company, offering its partners and sponsors complete marketing solutions."

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