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Peta O'Brien-Day

Peta O'Brien-Day is a UK-based brand messaging strategist and copywriter behind Words By Peta, helping values-led health and wellness businesses with ethical, empathy-based marketing.

Oct 29, 2026

18:33
And that's such an important thing to always go back to and remember.
18:37
No, it's really true.
18:38
Like when I'm working on messaging and language for people's launches, you can see them trying to fit everything what they do in all its nuance and kind of incredibleness into this template that says, this is where they start.
18:54
This is the magic thing that I do in the middle.
18:57
This is how they're fixed.
18:59
And like, sometimes that works.
19:01
Like if you are selling like paracetamol or an antibiotic, like, yes, that's fine.

19 MINS LATER

37:40
and there
9:03
that then just wasn't quite right and it felt like, oh, if I don't get this right, then am I a failure for not being able to sort of get this sorted? So what are the kind of things there that we are encouraged to use that And because I think as well for listeners, if they maybe have never thought about this, they might not even realise that this is why marketing feels so hard, because they haven't even realised that they're actually doing things that are giving them, you know, like making them feel horrible about what they're actually saying in the messaging.
9:36
Yeah, so probably two things.
9:39
two groups or two kind of like sections of things.
9:42
One is the story brand idea.
9:44
And for me, the overall problem with that is oversimplification on several different levels.
9:51
One, like you just said, trying to cram everything that you do in its nuance and gorgeousness and personality and yeah, and all that jazz, trying to cram it into this one sentence or this seven step kind of journey for, if you're selling something very simple, like a picture frame, although saying that I worked with a brand last year that was actually selling picture frames and it didn't really work for them either.
10:17
But if you're selling something very simple, then sure, you can follow that hero's journey story brand thing all the way to the end.

24 MINS LATER

34:12
yeah yeah definitely absolutely so can you talk a little bit about the heroine's journey because i'm very interested in your framework and

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