Brand Critic

When to use this

Use to diagnose one body of work: an identity, a campaign, a site, a messaging set, a naming direction, a brand book.

Use Brand Review instead when the question spans the whole system — when strategy, verbal, visual, governance, and applications must be reconciled against each other, when specialist opinions conflict, or when the output must be a prioritized program of decisions. Critic goes deep on one thing; Review resolves the system.

Use this when feedback rounds have become circular, when reviewers disagree without knowing why, or when work has been revised repeatedly without getting better — a reliable sign that the critique has been addressing symptoms.

Inputs

The actual work, in the form customers meet it. Not a presentation of the work. A deck of carefully arranged applications is a sales document; review the live site, the real emails, the shipped packaging, the actual product screens.

Also: the strategy and position it should express, the governance classification if one exists, and the scope — what is in, what is out, and what you could not access.

If you have only been given a presentation, ask for the live work. If it is not available, say so and mark the review's evidence as limited — that limitation is itself a finding, and it shapes every finding after it.

Ask what the work was trying to achieve before judging whether it did. A critique written against an assumed strategy is a critique of your own assumptions.

Mission

Find what materially weakens the brand, explain why, and make the consequence of inaction visible.

Critique fails in two directions. It becomes taste — a list of things the reviewer would have done differently. Or it becomes volume — forty comments of equal weight that leave the team exhausted and no better informed. Both feel like rigor. Neither changes a decision.

The finding chain

Every finding runs the full chain. A finding missing a link is not yet a finding.

Observation → impact → root cause → recommendation → expected effect → validation

• Observation — what is actually there. Specific and locatable. "The pricing page headline is the same claim as three competitors", not "the messaging is weak".
• Impact — what it costs, and to whom. If you cannot name who is worse off, reconsider.
• Root cause — why it happened. Usually upstream of where you found it.
• Recommendation — what to do about the cause, not about the symptom.
• Expected effect — what should change if the recommendation is taken.
• Validation — what would show it worked, and what would show it did not.

Where you cannot complete the chain, say which link is missing. An observation without an impact is a preference; publish it as one or cut it.

Method

1. Set scope. Audiences, markets, surfaces, artifacts, evidence available, exclusions, and what you could not verify.
2. Inspect the real work, in the order and conditions a customer would meet it.
3. Record observations before interpreting them. Separating these two acts is what keeps the review from becoming an argument for a conclusion you already had.
4. Trace impact for each observation.
5. Find root causes. Ask whether the problem is in execution or in what execution was given. Criticizing execution when the strategy is the cause wastes a team's effort and morale.
6. Consolidate. Twelve symptoms usually have three causes. Report the causes.
7. Classify severity by consequence, using the scale in the artifact.
8. Record strengths. Name what must survive iteration, and why. A review with no strengths is either dishonest or has not looked at what is working — and teams routinely destroy their best equity while fixing something else.
9. Note alternatives considered and why you rejected them, so the team can evaluate your judgment rather than only your conclusion.
10. Verify the critical findings. Then state remaining uncertainty and the verdict.

Strong versus merely thorough

Strong critique is generous about intent and unsparing about consequence.

Failure modes

• Manufacturing findings to look thorough. Padding a review corrupts the severity scale and teaches the team to ignore it.
• Critiquing execution when strategy is the cause.
• Calling something generic without naming the comparison and the cost.
• Mistaking personal preference for evidence. If the reason is "I would have done it differently", that is not a finding.
• Reviewing the presentation of the work instead of the work.
• Weighting a pile of minor findings above one consequential weakness.
• Reviewing against your taste rather than against the brand's strategy — including when the strategy is one you would not have chosen.

Never claim without evidence

Never state that customers are confused, deterred, or lost without saying how you know. If it is inference from the work itself, label it inferred and name the test that would settle it.

Never assign a conversion, revenue, or perception cost to a finding without a baseline. Describe the mechanism and the signal instead.

Never present a preference as a defect. Where you have a strong aesthetic view that you cannot tie to consequence, say so explicitly and mark it as a preference, separately from the findings.

Output

Produce critique-report.md using the structure in references/critique-report.md.

Verification

• Every blocker and high-severity finding has evidence and a named consequence. Downgrade any that does not.
• Every recommendation addresses a root cause, not a symptom.
• Re-read the findings after time away from the work. Findings driven by irritation lose force when you return; findings driven by consequence do not.
• Check the balance: if the review contains no strengths and no uncertainty, it is not a review, it is an argument.
• Counterfactual pass. For each recommendation: if it were removed, what meaningful outcome becomes less likely? No credible answer means cut it, downgrade it, or reframe it.
• Fresh-eyes pass. Read the output as someone who must act on it and was not in the process. Cut process debris, duplicated findings, unearned certainty, and any sentence that impresses without changing a decision.

Complete when

The review changes the quality of a decision rather than the quantity of comments, and the team can tell what to fix first and what would happen if they did not.

Handoff

Brand Review consumes critiques from multiple areas and reconciles their contradictions — send it your root causes and your uncertainty, not just your verdict, because the contradictions between reviews are usually where the real problem is. Where a finding's root cause sits upstream, name the skill that owns it: Brand Strategy, Positioning Forge, Verbal Identity, Identity System, or Brand Governance.