The Growing-Up Files, Issue 3
Everyone close enough to tell you the truth about your brand has a reason not to. And everyone honest enough to say it doesn't care enough.
So why can't you just get a straight answer about your growing brand? Two reasons:
The people close enough to care - your co-founder, your team, your partner who's heard about it over dinner for six years and would frankly rather talk about anything else - are too invested to be straight with you. "I think our whole positioning is off" is a big thing to say to the person who signs the payroll, so they try to reassure you, or they say nothing at all.
And the people detached enough to be honest - the big agency you bring in for a workshop, the consultant with the deck - are too far away to care enough to dig for the real answer. So they take what you tell them, tidy it up, and hand it back in a nicer font.
So you keep getting one half or the other, someone close enough to care or someone far enough to see clearly, but almost never both in the same person.
The role you're missing has a name
That "both at once" is a real role, with a name and actual academic research behind it (you know, rather than something I created for a LinkedIn post). It's called the critical friend, and it comes from education: two American educators, Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick, wrote down the definition in 1993, in a paper called "Through the Lens of a Critical Friend," and it's been in steady use since, in schools, youth work and coaching.
Boiled down, a critical friend is a trusted person who asks the questions nobody else will, holds your work up to a different light so you can see it properly, and gives you an honest critique because they're on the side of the work.
The version I love is the one I used as a youth worker. The adult who's neither parent nor peer, who's close enough to care, but distant enough to see clearly. They ask the question nobody else is asking, hold up the mirror nobody else is holding, and help you work out where you're going.
It turns out that's exactly what a scaling brand needs.
Fewer skate parks, more customer interviews
I spent fifteen years as a youthworker before I did any of this - it's what I first trained in at college, as a baby youthworker. In youth clubs, school corridors, the occasional skate park, building trust with people who had every reason not to give it, and learning to listen for what was being said underneath the words (A fifteen-year-old who says "I'm fine" is almost never fine. Neither is a founder who tells you the messaging's “ok”).
You develop a particular set of skills doing that work. Genuine listening, the ability to look past the surface-level story and find the real one, an instinct for what a person actually needs, rather than what they say they need.
That last one is the critical friend's core move, and it's the one that sets this apart from most brand work. A founder comes to me sure they need a brand voice guide, or a new tagline, or a website refresh, and the job is to not take that order at face value: to understand the context, ask the question nobody in their team has thought to ask, and work out what the real brief is, which is almost never the one they walked in with. (James, from last month's issue, came asking for a voice guide when the real problem was his messaging - the same story, every time.)
And it turns out an adolescent brand - grown past the scrappy startup, not yet a household name, slamming metaphorical doors and playing its music far too loud - needs a critical friend just as much as any actual fifteen-year-old does.
Why this makes my process different
Most brand strategists come to the work from marketing, or design, or copywriting. They're good at frameworks, and they reach for one. I came to it from fifteen years in a job that was entirely about people: listening for what's unsaid, holding up a mirror somebody didn't ask for, and staying trusted while doing it.
So you don't need someone to hand you a new tagline. You need someone who can really listen to your brand, interrogate the assumptions baked into it, and help you find the language that fits where you and your audience are right now. That's the work: proper discovery, real voice-of-customer research, and then the honest bit, telling you what still fits and what doesn't.
I'm on the side of the work, which sometimes means saying the thing you were hoping nobody would. But I’m also on your side - because I make a connection with, and care about all of my clients - see, there is a “friend” in critical friend!
My clients feel the difference.
Pippa, at The Disobedient Business Co., put it better than I could:
"I needed a critical friend at the very minimum - and someone with Peta's kind of expertise in an ideal world. Somebody to go through the wardrobe with me - keep that one, that suits you, bin that one, it looks bloody awful."
So what to do now?
Have a think about who currently tells you the truth about your brand, and be honest about which half they can give you.
Are they close enough to care, but too invested to be straight with you?
Or detached enough to be honest, but not interested enough to find the real answer?
If everyone advising you sits at one end, you've found the gap where a critical friend should be.
And if you'd like one of your own - close enough to care, honest enough to be useful, no eye-rolling or sighs of exasperation included - that's the whole of what I do. Book a call with me here, and let me be your brand's youthworker.
The Growing-Up Files goes out once a month, on how a brand's messaging has to grow up as the business behind it does.
